I go to work every day because I enjoy it. I look for­ward to it. The day that stops, I’ll promptly leave.

My employer appre­ci­ates my work. Approves of the effort I put in when work­ing with cus­tomers and cowork­ers. The day that stops, they’ll promptly ask me to leave.

No restric­tions. No threat of legal action. No drawn-out process.

That is employ­ment at will.

Edu­ca­tion needs this pol­icy in place at schools.

I’ve writ­ten about the lemon-dance — a prac­tice cre­ated by the stran­gle­hold unions place on school lead­er­ship to pro­vide ‘jus­ti­fied cause’ for release, result­ing in end­less com­mit­tee hear­ings and draw­ing out the teacher release to unnec­es­sary lengths.

Employ­ment at will works well in sit­u­a­tions where there is mutual trust between employer and employee. I sug­gest that if you are think­ing that such a pol­icy won’t work in edu­ca­tion, then per­haps the prob­lem is with the institution’s lack of mutual trust between lead­er­ship and teach­ers. I’ll be quick to admit I’ve seen exam­ples of awful lead­er­ship at schools, but this is the minor­ity. The major­ity of school lead­ers I’ve worked with have stu­dent inter­ests first, and would cheer the oppor­tu­nity to work in an orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports employ­ment at will.

Why not insti­tute employ­ment at will for teach­ers? Why should it be dif­fer­ent for pub­lic education?

I don’t typ­i­cally put my polit­i­cal views out there front and cen­ter, but a read through this Sunday’s State Jour­nal has me inspired to write what I believe is worth stand­ing for.

First, end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and end cor­po­rate wel­fare. Raise cor­po­rate income taxes and the upper brack­ets of the pro­gres­sive income tax until the deficit is elim­i­nated, the bud­get is bal­anced and our infra­struc­ture is rebuilt. Elim­i­nate loop­holes in cor­po­rate income taxes that allow com­pa­nies like GE to make $14.2 bil­lion in prof­its and not pay a dime in income tax.

Pro­hibit cor­po­ra­tions from mov­ing off­shore to avoid pay­ing taxes.

Pass a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment pro­hibit­ing cor­po­rate money in pol­i­tics. Repeal Citizen’s United.

Elim­i­nate child tax cred­its for chil­dren beyond the first two born to a couple.

Elim­i­nate inef­fi­cien­cies and waste in the Defense Depart­ment and domes­tic programs.

Cre­ate single-payer uni­ver­sal national health care. With­out this reform, pri­vate health insur­ance and med­ical care will con­tinue to spi­ral out of control.

Pass a sus­tain­able green national energy pol­icy, and a strong cli­mate con­trol plan. Let the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency do its job.

Reform the bank­ing and finan­cial indus­tries through stronger gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions. Respect the priv­i­lege of work­ers to col­lec­tively bar­gain and to unionize.

Stop demo­niz­ing Medicare, Med­ic­aid, and Social Secu­rity. Doing so resolves noth­ing and polar­izes peo­ple. These three pro­grams pro­vide an impor­tant safety net to Amer­i­cans. Indeed, they rep­re­sent some of the most impor­tant and suc­cess­ful leg­is­la­tion in our nation’s history.

And finally, get out of Afghanistan and Iraq. We can­not afford to sus­tain these wars, and it’s ques­tion­able whether our con­tin­ued pres­ence is doing more to pro­mote ter­ror­ism than pre­vent it.

Oppor­tu­ni­ties are all about luck. Put your­self in a posi­tion for luck to find you.

You’re not going to find your dream job by send­ing out cover let­ters and resumes. You need to get out there and meet peo­ple that can open the doors for you.

You’re not going to start a bil­lion dol­lar busi­ness on the first try. You need to microtest your idea and, when you real­ize it won’t work, try some­thing else.

You’re not going to find your soul­mate at the bar. You need to min­gle in places where luck will bring you and your soul­mate close, real­ize the oppor­tu­nity and seize it.

Hang with the peo­ple you aspire to being.

If you want to be a top lawyer, you need to roll with the top lawyers. Find their pro­fes­sional events and crash them.

If you want to be a top busi­ness­man, never pass up an offer to get you in the door of a busi­ness net­work­ing event.

If you want to be rich, roll with the play­ers. To the extent that you stay sur­rounded by peo­ple of your socioe­co­nomic strata you will, more often than not, remain in that strata.  Given the oppor­tu­nity to jump ahead and be sur­rounded by peo­ple from a higher strata, you will see the chance to move your­self to join that strata.

Let me just get this out there before I go too deep — I think teach­ers unions rep­re­sent an impor­tant and valu­able aspect of pub­lic edu­ca­tion. I agree with about 80% of what they stand for, and appre­ci­ate what they’ve done for teach­ers’ pay and ben­e­fits in the past 40 years.

How­ever, a num­ber of stan­dard prac­tices in teach­ers unions are inef­fec­tive, self-defeating, and just plain wrong.

Take tenure, for exam­ple. Pub­lic school teach­ers through­out the coun­try are cov­ered by tenure, a set of legal pro­tec­tions that makes their dis­missal for incom­pe­tence or malfea­sance a com­pli­cated and expen­sive process. The result: few dis­missals of incom­pe­tent teach­ers, and an inabitl­ity to reward excep­tional teach­ers and keep them in the classroom.

Another archaic prac­tice — step and lane increases. These are awarded to teach­ers who’ve earned degrees beyond their bachelor’s. In many cases, these increases are auto­matic. While in many indus­tries, addi­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is rewarded with pay increases, they are not automatic.

Why make them auto­matic in pub­lic edu­ca­tion? Pro­po­nents argue these increases reward the effort. How­ever, mak­ing them auto­matic defeats the spirit of these increases — mea­sured per­for­mance gains in the classroom.

My biggest rant on teach­ers unions is that unions pro­tect inef­fec­tive teach­ers. These teach­ers rep­re­sent dis­ci­pli­nary prob­lems, man­age­ment prob­lems, and stu­dent per­for­mance prob­lems. These teach­ers need the union to pro­tect them from the school lead­ers that might have the power to remove them from the class­room except for the hand-tying result­ing from the unions. What’s more, I believe these inef­fec­tive teach­ers rep­re­sent a small per­cent­age of over­all teach­ers — less than 10%. But they rep­re­sent sig­nif­i­cantly higher costs to the schools, dis­tricts, and taxpayers.

Until teach­ers unions under­stand that pro­tect­ing the inef­fec­tive in their ranks is self-defeating, they will con­tinue to face an adver­sar­ial rela­tion­ship with those pro­mot­ing pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion pol­icy like pay-for-performance, char­ter schools, vouch­ers, and school lead­er­ship autonomy.

What I pro­pose is a new way of orga­ni­za­tion– a union whose mem­ber­ship ranks are filled with teach­ers meet­ing per­for­mance guide­lines and objec­tive guide­lines for qual­ity. Addi­tion­ally, school lead­er­ship with the abil­ity to per­ma­nently remove inef­fec­tive teach­ers, pre­vent­ing them from con­tin­u­ing the lemon dance.

Some peo­ple are always in the mid­dle of the bell curve.

Take any pop­u­la­tion any­where on the planet and mea­sure just about any­thing, and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the pop­u­la­tion almost always comes out as a per­fect bell curve. Weird? No. Just nor­mal (Gauss­ian to the sta­tis­ti­cians out there). 

Pub­lic edu­ca­tion in Wis­con­sin has tra­di­tion­ally been very strong. High demand for scarce open teach­ing posi­tions should mean that the best are teach­ing our students. 

How­ever, when you exam­ine more closely the socioe­co­nomic back­grounds of those mak­ing up the bal­ance of stu­dent pop­u­la­tions in Wis­con­sin schools, many come from strong two-parent fam­i­lies with mid­dle class incomes, with high expec­ta­tions for per­for­mance in the classroom.

I sur­mise that what many con­sider excep­tional is actu­ally quite aver­age. There are a hand­ful of excep­tional, trans­for­ma­tional teach­ers work­ing, with the most gifted in these schools, or the most chal­lenged (read: on the unlucky end of the achieve­ment gap). There are a hand­ful of unfor­tu­nate ‘lif­ers’ regur­gi­tat­ing the same tired les­son plans for the past 15 years. And the bal­ance are in the mid­dle, pro­vid­ing a firm, aver­age education.

Did these teach­ers choose to be aver­age, or did it just end up that way?

We know that in just about any mar­ket­place, the lag­gards get wiped out. Orga­ni­za­tions that lag behind the competition’s new prod­ucts see their sales decline. Indi­vid­u­als who don’t exert enough energy are more likely to get laid off.

It appears, how­ever, that in many areas of the pub­lic sec­tor, this rule does not apply. Par­tic­u­larly in education. 

In Wis­con­sin, step and lane increases are awarded to teach­ers who’ve earned degrees beyond their bachelor’s. In many cases, these increases are auto­matic. While in many indus­tries, addi­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is rewarded with pay increases, they are not automatic.

Pub­lic school teach­ers through­out the coun­try are cov­ered by tenure, a set of legal pro­tec­tions that makes their dis­missal for incom­pe­tence or malfea­sance a com­pli­cated and expen­sive process.  The result: few dis­missals of incom­pe­tent teach­ers, and an inabitl­ity to reward excep­tional teach­ers and keep them in the classroom.

The most fas­ci­nat­ing thing about the bell curve is that some peo­ple and some orga­ni­za­tions nat­u­rally grav­i­tate to a cer­tain section. 

So how do you get more teach­ers on the far right of the curve in the class­room and keep them there?

• Develop a tool to objec­tively evaulate teach­ers based on their stu­dents’ mas­tery of state objectives.
• Reward those teach­ers scor­ing at the high­est of these ranks with increased salary and ben­e­fits, and
• Encour­age those teach­ers with the low­est mas­tery scores to seek other employment.

Hey Madi­son… Here’s an inter­est­ing trend you’ll want to fol­low closely– the rails com­mu­nity in your town is alive and growing.

I just attended the Mad-Railers meetup last night at Murfie’s head­quar­ters down­town. The event was well-attended — at least 25 peo­ple across all lev­els of abil­ity. What I found most exi­ct­ing was the num­ber of expe­ri­enced rail­ers there to help out. 

My biggest take­away was get­ting a chance to talk with a few of the expe­ri­enced rail­ers about what they do for free­lanc­ing and projects they are work­ing on.

And their day jobs. Turns out Getty has a shop in Madi­son. I was totally obliv­i­ous, but not any more. And they are pro­gram­ming in Ruby!

I wanted to get this out there– a list of resources for new folks like myself to boot­strap the Ruby / Rails learn­ing. Now I share with you…

Ruby

- Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
 - A very weird, but also very good, free online intro­duc­tion to ruby.

- Ruby Koans: http://rubykoans.com/
 - Learn ruby in small chunks while TDDing

- Pro­gram­ming Ruby 1.9: http://amzn.com/1934356085
 - The newest ver­sion of the first suc­cess­ful Eng­lish book on Ruby

- The Well-Grounded Ruby­ist: http://amzn.com/1933988657
 - A high rated ruby book good for begin­ners or inter­me­di­ate rubyists

- Ruby 1.9 Peep­Code: http://peepcode.com/products/ruby19-i
 - screen­cast intro to ruby 1.9

- Ruby Inside: http://www.rubyinside.com/
 - a pop­u­lar ruby and rails blog.

Rails

- The Rails 3 Way: http://amzn.com/0321601661
 - A very com­pre­hen­sive Rails 3 book

- http://railsapi.com/
 - easy to search API docs for rails

- Meet Rails 3: http://peepcode.com/products/meet-rails-3-i
 - screen­cast cov­er­ing Rails 3

- Railscasts: http://railscasts.com/
 - free screen­casts cov­er­ing Rails and rails plugins

- Rail­stips: http://railstips.org/
 - blog cov­er­ing rails and related topics

Few orga­ni­za­tions have been able to recruit such high-quality peo­ple into an orga­ni­za­tion, track their progress, then objec­tively eval­u­ate their per­for­mance to deter­mine who the best are. Teach For Amer­ica is one of these organizations.

I think the qual­i­ties that make a teacher excel­lent in the class­room trans­late very well to the startup world. There is a huge amount of auton­omy in the class­room of an urban or rural school. Set these for­mer teach­ers loose at a startup and they’d be unstop­pable forces.

Teach For Amer­ica uses the Teach­ing As Lead­er­ship frame­work as guid­ance for what excel­lent teach­ers do in the class­room.  It seems a nat­ural exten­sion, then, to apply this Teach­ing As Lead­er­ship frame­work to star­tups. You’ll see a ‘Frame­work for Star­tups’ in the next few weeks, tak­ing the most rel­e­vant pieces of TAL and fit­ting it into a new frame­work social entre­pre­neurs and tech­nol­ogy star­tups alike can use to pro­vide direc­tion to their efforts.

We’re teach­ing the wrong things in school.

We are focus­ing too much on reward­ing what the indi­vid­ual knows rather than how they work with oth­ers and prob­lem solve in a team.

The cur­rent push for stan­dard­ized test­ing only rein­forces this mis­placed focus. States are using these stan­dard­ized tests to deter­mine who grad­u­ates, how fund­ing is dis­trib­uted, teacher pay, and what schools stay open and which close.

Using a mea­sure­ment tool to deter­mine those things is not wrong.  Schools are just using the wrong tool to measure.

Instead of test­ing, develop a project-based cur­ricu­lum that empha­sizes 21st cen­tury skills like tech­nol­ogy skills, live and career skills, cre­ativ­ity and crit­i­cal thinking.

Stu­dents need to be eval­u­ated on their abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate ideas, work within teams, think crit­i­cally on real-world prob­lems, and demon­strate life skills such as dis­ci­pline and character.

What­ever busi­ness you are in, think about this scary sta­tis­tic: 75% of all busi­nesses in the US depend 100% on the US con­sumer.  Amer­ica is a consumer-driven econ­omy, which is why things get rough when con­sumers keep their cash safely tucked away rather than spend it.

We should cel­e­brate the other 25% that have fig­ured out what it is that the rest of the world wants and are sell­ing it to them. Emerg­ing mar­kets are a sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­nity in the Amer­i­can econ­omy, one that should be pur­sued in the efforts of tran­si­tion­ing this 75% econ­omy with a more global one.