The Answers

A column on education in Watkins Glen

The following was written by Travis Durfee, President of the Watkins Glen Faculty Association. It is the second in a continuing series of monthly columns.

Last week the Watkins Glen Central School District Board of Education hosted a community conversation to discuss the replacement of our retiring superintendent, Tom Phillips. The board’s decision to open the replacement process to the community is good policy by the board and good service to the community. The WGFA relayed the results from last week’s meeting on our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/WGFacultyAssociation. View the results and like the page for future updates.

Mr. Phillips leaves our district after more than a decade, a span of time that covered many significant changes for our district. We closed a historic building. We merged campuses. We renovated our facilities. High-stakes state testing became evermore present in our classrooms under the guise of accountability. Parents and students opted-out, rejecting the state’s top-down, scripted approach to education under the Common Core Learning Standards. Today, in fact, our district operates in a moratorium from the test-and-punish agenda of accountability via state tests. But the future awaits...

The moratorium expires in a few short years. Currently the state is accepting public comment on new learning standards. Those new standards will inform classroom practice and our children’s education in the years to come ... until the next iteration of standards and reforms is deemed necessary. Will our next district leader support top-down education, or empowering professional educators to develop engaging learning experiences? These are among the many outstanding questions we must know of our next superintendent.

New leadership within a school district can be difficult to describe. How-to guides for new superintendents are few and far between. One that I found online offered instructions in how to craft a newsworthy statement, how to conduct an interview with a member of the news media and how to respond to public critics. That may be helpful, but we are less interested in a superintendent who gets headlines than we are in a superintendent who gets education.

A few years back I read a book by a social scientist who studies motivation. The author, Daniel Pink, published the book Drive, which explores why people want to succeed. In his book, Pink identified three factors that drive people to success: autonomy, mastery and purpose. These easily apply to the good work of teaching.

As a motivating factor teachers have purpose in spades. What an honor and a privilege to serve as an educator in a community, to know that you are responsible for developing the experiences and sharing the ideas that will shape the young minds that enter into your classroom every day. Mastery easily follows suit. No true educator lacks the urge to improve his or her teaching practice in light of the ultimate responsibility of educating the next generation. We arrive at autonomy, the ability to direct one’s own activities. And it is within the realm of autonomy that teachers often face obstacles.

Ill-considered mandates on curriculum and insufficient courage to fight bad policy tethers teachers in ways that hold students back. The barriers to autonomy for educators often come from the expectations and directives of our leaders: are teachers expected to use scripted curricula? Are test scores so important that we should teach to the test to improve results? Or, will the district fight for the autonomy to determine our own measures of a high quality education? Will our district be courageous enough to trust the experts and allow educators to exercise professional judgment within their field of expertise? I would like to know how our future superintendent would answer those key questions. We would know a good deal about their vision for the future from the responses.

Gratitude is in order to Board President Kelly McCarthy and the rest of the BOE for opening this discussion to the public early. Thanks are due to Mr. Phillips, whose advance notice of his departure allows the district to complete a thorough, collaborative, public process for finding a new superintendent, a monumental decision for any community.

We want an honest leader in charge of our district. We want a superintendent who was an experienced and accomplished teacher before transitioning to the front office, someone who embraces the struggles along the curious journey of developing meaningful educational experiences for students. We want an egoless champion of integrity in our next superintendent. We want a leader worth following.

Travis Durfee
President
Watkins Glen Faculty Association
watkinsglenfacultyassociation@gmail.com