The American Academy of Pediatrics released a new recommendation last week concerning the response to head lice in school-age children.  They want us to leave kids with head lice in the classrooms while their parents treat the condition at home. Apparently, lice don’t pose a serious enough risk to warrant missed school.

They’re right, of course. The worst thing about lice is that your head itches. That, and knowing that you have insects crawling around on your scalp. Other than that, it doesn’t get any worse. Strep throat, on the other hand, can get really bad. So can influenza, measles, chicken pox and the mumps. And unlike those afflictions, lice aren’t terribly contagious. They can be controlled with reasonable precautions.

So all in all, there’s no compelling medical reason to keep a kid home from school just because she has head lice. The cost of a missed day of school is more than the benefit of a day of quarantine. And besides, head lice cases are frequently over-diagnosed. At my school we send kids home if they have anything in their hair that even looks like lice at any stage of their life cycle.

That said, there’s no way this recommendation is going to fly. For three reasons.

First of all there’s the creep factor. Germs are one thing. All of us know we have germs, but we can’t see them, can’t feel them when they move, and most of us just aren’t that freaked about them. Lice are different. They’re actual insects, and knowing that there are insects; real, live, visible insects moving around on our heads is just too much to bear. The same goes for our kids. The American public is not ready to accept the possibility that their kids could bring lice home from school with no official intervention.

Which brings me to the second reason. Getting rid of lice is an expensive proposition, in terms of time and money. Bedding needs to be cleaned, along with coats, sweaters and hats. Special shampoo and medicine needs to be purchased and applied. Many families simply don’t have the capacity or the time to handle the situation.

Which brings me to the third reason. The Academy of Pediatrics has acknowledged that head lice have ceased to be a medical problem. They are no longer handled by the medical community. Schools, for all intents and purposes, are charged with the diagnosis of the condition as well as the prescription of the treatment. The Academy suggests that parents take over that entire role. Parents should regularly check their children’s heads, get rid of any lice they find and continue to send their kids to school in the meantime. The problem, of course, is that every parent has to actively participate. If this were Finland, Japan or some other mythical, fully-functional nation, that suggestion might be feasible. But this America. We can’t really count on one another for stuff like regular lice checks.

So this idea by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well-intentioned and logical as it may be, simply won’t work. It’s a lousy idea.

Although my father was a successful city manager for over twenty-five years, he was not perfect. At one point, the city needed to replace several police cruisers. Looking to save some cash, he decided to buy and convert some used Checker Cabs from a large city on the east coast. When his police force heard about the idea, they were alarmed. Not only did they not want to be seen driving around in used taxis, they were convinced that the cars were top-heavy and would tip over. A stubborn man, my father proceeded with the purchase, ignoring the very people charged with implementing his ill-conceived plan. Sure enough, within two months, each of the cars had rolled over in the line of duty. No one was hurt, thank God, but my father learned an important lesson: when you develop a new program or idea, you need to involve the people who will actually be implementing it. Otherwise it’s doomed.

People, including cops, don’t like change unless they’re involved with the process; especially when the change comes from someone who doesn’t have a first-hand understanding of its implications.

My father learned that the hard way.

I was reminded of this story after spending a week working with a bunch of teachers in the Washington DC area. Compared to what I’m used to in the Seattle area, these teachers are demoralized, disenfranchised and de-professionalized. And these were National Board candidates, who tend to be among the most optimistic, the most enfranchised and the most professional. Teacher after teacher told about ill-conceived policy after ill-conceived policy coming from the top down, with one administrator after another telling them how they should handle the very real problems facing the region. And not once were they ever consulted.

Washington State, by and large, places much more value on teacher leadership and teacher involvement. Teachers sit on committees, make important decisions and are much more in charge of their own professional development. We don’t always agree with the outcome, but we at least feel we’ve been a part of the process. Consequently, we’re more supportive of our educational policy and less inclined to participate in “passive sabotage.”

Much will be made of Washington State’s failure to make the list of finalists in round two of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top sweepstakes. In drafting the legislative package that preceded our application, state leaders decided to choose consensus over bold reforms. They decided to adopt reforms that most school districts, as well as the WEA, would support, instead of a package that included such things as charter schools and test-score merit pay.

Good for them. They listened to the people who have to actually implement their policies. Teachers and school-level administrators know about charter schools. They know how they can quickly become unsustainable burn-out factories that fail to deliver on their promise to show non-charter schools new and promising pedagogy. They know what happens to the overall mission of a school when an unreasonable amount of emphasis is placed on standardized test scores. That is, test scores for test scores’ sake, not as an indication of real student learning.

So we lost out on some much-needed money. That happens. I honestly believe that we’re better off making due with a little less cash than having the money to spend on policies that those of us in the field don’t really support.

Sour grapes? Maybe. Tippy police cars? Definitely.

There's a motto that I like to think by: "Doubt what you know." It's a comfortable, if somewhat ambiguous way to go through life. Take sports, for example. I knew the Mariners were going to be competitive this year. but I also doubted it. 

When it comes to school reform, I know certain things. I know that merit pay doesn't work and that total restructuring - firing an entire staff and selectively rehiring some of them - doesn't work.

But then came Annapolis High School. In a recent story for NPR, Claudio Sanchez (the coolest voice on the radio) reported on AHS's graduating seniors. When they were freshmen, the school was a train wreck. They had a huge achievement gap, with black male ninth graders failing at a rate of 72%, and they made Maryland's list of worst schools.

Along came a charismatic principal and $3 million dollars of school district money.

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It seems to me that the whole point of every school reform measure that’s come along within the past 25 years can be distilled into these six words: A Good Teacher in Every Classroom.

It’s a simple mandate, but with several implicit complications. First of all, what do we mean by “a good teacher?” And who gets to decide which teachers are good? And once we decide who’s good and who isn’t, how do we make sure each classroom gets a good one?

Underlying these complications is a fragile balance between job security and accountability. Teachers, like me, tend to lean a little more toward job security at the expense of accountability. We’d rather tolerate the fact that there might be some horrible teachers if it means that our own jobs are relatively secure. Parents, like me, lean more toward accountability; we’re willing to tolerate a few unfairly fired teachers if it means that our own children have zero chance of spending the year with a bad teacher. (That’s right, I’m schizophrenic.)

So what is a good teacher? And who does the labeling? And what do we do after the labeling? These were some of the questions addressed in a recent discussion hosted by Education Sector, featuring three panelists: Scott Thompson from IMPACT, the new teacher evaluation system for the Washington, D.C., public schools; Brad Jupp, senior program adviser for teacher quality initiatives at the U.S. Department of Education; and Jen Mulhern, from the New Teacher Project, who worked with New Haven on their new evaluation system. Ed Sector also wanted to bring the voice of teachers into the discussion, so they included a separate panel with four teacher bloggers, one of whom was me.

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It’s technically a stupid question, with an answer that ends up eating itself. That’s because the tools we use to measure teachers are the same tools we use to measure schools: test scores. So a bad teacher, by definition, is a teacher whose students are getting low test scores, and a bad school is one with teachers whose students are getting bad test scores. Therefore, the good teachers will always be in the good schools, and vice-versa.

Technically, that is. But we all know that there are good and bad teachers who are good or bad independent of their students’ test scores. If that’s true (and it is) surely it would behoove us to work out a system where the best teachers work with the neediest children, right?

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We were driving home down I-5 a few weeks ago when Freebird came on the radio. So I turned it up, since that’s what you’re supposed to do, and began to sing. There I was, a middle-aged, suburban man, singing Rock and Roll’s quintessential anthem of existential freedom while driving my family of four down the highway in a Dodge Caravan. It didn’t matter; at that moment I was a Freebird.

But apparently the irony wasn’t lost on the ghosts of Lynyrd Skynyrd. For it was at the song’s climatic moment, where all three guitars are going after it full-tilt, that our mini-van’s fuel pump stopped doing that for which it is named. And if those dead old boys had something to do with it, I can’t blame them. We coasted to the shoulder as the song ended. I was no longer a Freebird.

Ten days and a new fuel pump later, I received two messages. One was from our mechanic and the other from my school district’s central office.

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Last week I had my end-of-the-year evaluation. I walked into my principal’s office, closed the door and discussed my progress on the goals we had set forth back in September. And when all was said and done, I found out that I am “satisfactory.” What a relief.

Actually, in my district, as in most, you have to be pretty bad to be “unsatisfactory,” and “satisfactory” is as good as you can get, which can leave most of us who have a stake in the teacher evaluation system feeling somewhat, well…unsatisfied.

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By Tom

I’ve been following Congress’ “passive decision” to draw the line on deficit spending just when there was a $23 billion education bill in the works, designed to bridge the gap between the $100 billion given to education last year and some time in the future in which education is fully funded. Sponsored by Senators Harkin and Miller, both Democrats, it received tepid support from Obama and even tedider support from Congressional Democrats. By all accounts, it is isn't going anywhere, and will probably be dead by the time you read this.

But I still feel like talking about it.

We’ve bailed out God knows how many banks and investment firms in the past two years, along with a car company, but when education asks for some emergency money to keep a couple hundred thousand teachers in the classroom for another year, suddenly it’s time to count pennies.

Fine; I get it. We can't just put everything on Visa for the next ten years. We need to draw the line somewhere, and start paying for stuff, even education, with real money. But what we don’t need is nonsense like the recent editorial in the Seattle Times by Lynne Varner. Read it yourself, if you want, but she makes two bold points that I can’t ignore:

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