The Leadership Lesson Our Schools Need

If I were to be highly critical of the education system in the United States and I compare how we teach and embody leadership in the various industries and professions in our nation, the military is very far ahead in the way that they teach leadership. They're constantly updating it, changing it, and at every rank you get taught leadership. Corporate America fits and starts with pretty good, at least open minded to new ideas, politics, policing, about 20 years behind. And I would put education about 10 or 15 years behind as well. We don't teach teachers how to lead, we don't teach administrators how to lead. And people are getting promoted without necessarily having the skill set of leadership, which may explain sometimes why they become so obsessed with metrics. It's because there's nothing else to measure a judge. And the question is, are we getting the right people in the right seats to begin with? And when I hear, when I talk to people in an administrative position who are no longer in the classroom, what is your priority? They all tell me, number one priority is the children. Completely wrong, Completely wrong. The administrator's priority, the principal's priority is not the children, it's the teachers. If the teachers feel taken care of, they will have the energy to focus on the thing that is their priority, that's the students. But if they have politics or fear when they come to school, they're going to spend so much time and energy protecting themselves from each other and protecting themselves from the principals or the administrators that frankly, that will take energy and attention away from students. So bad leadership hurts kids because of the trickle down and good leadership helps kids because the trickle down. So the superintendents have to be worried about the school systems, the principals have to be worried about the teachers, and the teachers have to be worried about the students. In other words, people.