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.