Dal George Lawrence, who advanced a teaching profession around excellence, pride, collegiality and performance, died on May 14 at Hospice of Northwest Ohio, Perrysburg. Mr. Lawrence, president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers from 1966 to 1996, was 86 and lived in Sylvania, Ohio, with his wife of 46 years, Francine Lawrence. Mr. Lawrence was born on August 10, 1932. He grew up on a farm between McComb and Findlay, Ohio and spent his childhood doing what country boys do, mastering the art of running a farm. Read the full obituary.
Below is an article Lawrence wrote and shared with our GL TURN colleagues in 2013 on the TURN website:
THE GEOLOGY OF SCHOOL REFORM
Dal George Lawrence, 2013
fault/ a weakness, an imperfection in the earth's crust with the potential to disrupt. We all know about the San Andreas Fault and the threat it holds for those near it. Could it be that our nation's schools have inherent faults that cause great disruptions? Do we have a San Andreas we are ignoring? Are the faults beyond fixing? What impact do these fundamental flaws have on the reform effort?
If we think like geologists, we can identify numerous faults in the way our nation operates its schools. Two stand out that need the immediate attention of reformers, legislators, and all of us who work in public schools. The first is the casual way we train teachers and introduce them to the classroom. However, there is some good news here because, in theory, this fault can be fixed, or at least improved. The other fault cannot be fixed. It is rooted in fifty state legislatures and firmly implanted in the minds of most of the public. It is the way we operate and govern schools. It is a model borrowed from industry decades ago and long since discarded by today’s successful businesses. It is a loose system characterized by top-down, mind-numbing, credential driven leadership that produces the wrong result time after time. The fact that such leadership exists with a college educated workforce is in itself remarkable. Now add two other significant facts: teaching is a complex, time-sensitive activity and when done well, or poorly, it defines success or failure for the whole system. And roughly ten percent of new teachers have chosen the wrong occupation. Combine these and you have the perfect quake of epic proportion. Imagine what would happen to a business that relied on highly skilled workers to produce its product and a tenth of its workforce should not have been employed in the first place!
We can improve the induction process despite obstacles such as inadequate funds and entrenched vested interests. Other nations have already done it. Those that score best on international tests take care to identify the most qualified teacher candidates. Some even pay them to go to college. Inserting these graduates into the classroom is a careful process not unlike the established internships and residencies in the medical profession. It requires leadership that does not currently exist to revise our training and induction process, but there are models that can point the way.
Our entrenched state mandated governance system is too much to overcome. It is an arrangement that defines leadership and excellence through credentials irrespective of ability or vision. It is a system that regularly ignores talent and rarely uses it outside established boundaries. It defines career success as never having to teach again and upholds mediocrity as a normal community standard. It is a system that pits workers and managers against each other and only casually considers competence an immutable overall goal. Failure goes unattended because failure is the fault of someone or something else. To put it bluntly, we are building kids exactly like GM, Ford, and Chrysler built cars six decades ago and getting the same flawed results.
Not all is lost, however. The key is to create mechanisms that produce positive results in spite of the odds. Peer review, jointly managed, is a prime example because everyone acknowledges that evaluation of teachers and administrators is deeply flawed. Together, that fault can be fixed, and in the process we can take the first step toward a larger good: creating a harmonious and goal oriented workplace focused on excellence. Peer review done poorly is not much better than the traditional evaluation system. Its beauty lies in the creation of a union-management panel that presides over the process with overall competence accepted as the benchmark for its decisions. By doing so, union and management work together to fix a decades-old problem. And why not? No one has a vested interest in incompetent performance except the attorneys who represent those who might not have been ideal candidates in the first place. The old evaluation model pits union against management with neither knowing how to deal with an individual’s poor teaching or administrative practice. The natural outcome is distrust no matter the result; a distrust that spills over and impedes solution driven working relationships.
Of course, we are creatures of what we know, or think we know. School administrators are in charge, so naturally many of them at first see peer review as turf invasion, or worse, a blow to their ability to use the evaluation process as the ultimate indicator of who is in charge. Teachers think they are professionals, and firing one of their own is heresy despite the illogic of this conventional wisdom.
Irrespective of these tremors, there is a way to get school people to think differently about their work and about each other. It starts with a simple question, a question that unfortunately never gets asked. Ask any group of teachers, "How would you like to be part of a teaching profession that is respected for its high standards and excellence?" Every hand in the room will go up. That is the key. Now we can talk about medicine and other classic professions. We can talk about standards, ownership, professional responsibility, and what it takes from each of us to achieve excellence. With that simple question plus leadership, patience, and determination we can move our teacher unions, and often reluctant managements, in the direction that all teachers and wise managers want.
Collective bargaining won't disappear because San Andreas won't disappear. Negotiations though will put a much higher priority on measures that ensure excellent teaching performance. This is not Pollyanna stuff. In Toledo, we have non-renewed or terminated over 400 contracts, nearly a fourth of which have been continuing contracts. Peer review is the most popular thing the union does based on polling numbers over several decades. Administrators survived the initial shock of "losing control" and most became supporters of the process. Managers can be assigned sole evaluation responsibilities during year two without undermining the ownership issue so important to teachers in the first year. Two semesters of peer review are sufficient to discover who can teach and establish the ownership of standards in the minds of the teaching staff. Beyond the first two years, evaluation can be a shared effort because the critical buy-in has already taken place. Effective managers know that sharing responsibilities in ways that get dramatically better results is worth the risk of temporary disapproval. Often, a superintendent, or another top official, leads the way for his or her down-the-line managers.
The San Andreas Fault does not yield easily to positive change. The good news is that we can turn the governance system to the advantage of everyone without the impossible task of convincing the political establishment that its conventional wisdom about school organization is wrong-headed. Perhaps now reformers of every stripe, those with money and those without, those with ideas and those without, those who believe that unions are the problem and those who are wedded to the competition model, will realize that the future of public education lies more in the potential of talented school personnel rather than quick fixes that arise from conventional wisdom.
Critics find fault, too, but they are not geologists. It is the obligation of those of us who work in schools to build mechanisms that ensure that continuing eruptions and disasters are avoided. It can be done.
Dal Lawrence was president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers for thirty years. He created the nation's first peer review and peer mentoring program in 1981.