Leadership During Change

Abstract

The national education system, similar to the Kansas education system, has seen little change since the 1800s (Throckmorton, 1967). In fact, over 50 years later, there have been few changes. Children come to school around the age of five to enter kindergarten and then move through the current system by age and grade level. These children sit in rows, are addressed by the expert teacher, are given information, and are expected to memorize and regurgitate the material in a standardized testing process. Schools in Kansas predominately open their doors in August and close in May (KSDE, 2018), perpetuating the long history of an educational system that spans almost 200 years. Moving a school system away from that dynamic is hard, and it is wrought with human challenges. What change needs to occur to meet the economic needs of the future? One major challenge to creating new learning environments is the lack of leadership at the individual school and district levels to help teachers feel safe and confident in making crucial classroom instructional changes (Bush, 2008). Faced with enormous pressure, teachers are asked to advance students academically and to show growth in learning. Our current education system does not always allow leaders the time needed to make the necessary changes. According to the Kansas Board of Regents, in January of 2016, Kansas had only 52% of the workforce holding some form of post-secondary education, which did not fully meet and would not be able to meet the needs of business and industry (2016). Unfortunately, this means that having only a high school diploma is not enough to secure a middle-class lifestyle (Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 2013). Also, not surprisingly, this is paralleled at the national level. Eighty percent of all jobs today are in the service sector. Jobs in industries like business services, education, health care, and office services require higher levels of interpersonal and problemsolving skills because the work entails higher levels of human interaction and personalized responses to people's wants and needs (Carnevale et al. 2013). This information, as well as the Kansas post-secondary information included in Figure 1, reveals that Kansas students who graduated from 2013-2018 are not leaving high school with the skills they need for post-secondary success. Post-secondary success is defined, in Kansas, as students who continue in college beyond the first year. This definition includes consideration of an effective rate, which, according to the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) is a combination of a student's graduation success and the student's status two years after graduation (2016).