Episode 1: An Introduction to Dancing in the Mind Fields of Public Education

This podcast is the first episode of the first year of our series of podcasts. In it, Phil Stover provides an introduction to the concept of Dancing in the Mind Fields of Public Education in the United States.  Phil provides an overview of his background working in more than 100 districts and institutions of higher learning.

This initial podcast presents the core thesis behind all of Phil's podcasts; that despite a district's best efforts, teaching and learning are subject to a whole host of external and internal factors that either enhance or inhibit classroom outcomes. Those forces extend way beyond the classroom to the district itself as a part of the community, state, and nation. A successful educator learns to dance around the minefields of public education while at the same time enjoying the dance of nurturing student's minds. That summarizes Dancing in the Mind Fields, the theme of this podcast series. Enjoy! 

Contact us at:  
phil@thedistrictmatters.com or
phil@riovistagroup.com

Via our Website:
http://www.riovistagroup.com

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Dancing in the Mind Fields and Instituto de Estudios de Historia Mexicana are subsidiaries of Rio Vista Group LLC

Enjoy listening to the podcasts and let's all keep on dancing!

Transcript

Episode 1 Season 1 – Dancing in the Mindfields Podcast

An Introduction

Greetings from sunny Chihuahua, Mexico. Welcome to the first episode of the first season of my new podcast, “Dancing in the Mind Fields.” This series of podcasts, along with the website and Facebook page will be an opportunity for us to discuss the joys and challenges of the forces for and against public education in the United States.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Phil Stover. I am the host for this podcast. I have spent many years (somewhere around forty or so) dancing in the mind fields of public education. Just to clarify, that is mind with a d. Often the mind fields of public education resemble conflicts where two or more sides duke it out to control the mission and manner of educating and influencing students. 

I guess I should also point out to any copy editors listening to this, I understand I created what is often referred to as an “eggcorn” in the podcasts’ title. Perhaps if you learn nothing else from this episode, you will appreciate the meaning of an eggcorn. When I use the term “dancing in the mind fields,” I hope it reminds you of the phrase “dancing in the minefields.” That is the intent. While public schools are wonderful and challenging places to work, part of the wonder and challenge is avoiding the many mines that can disrupt learning or careers. 

Those who are successful at, and who actually enjoy the dance, will understand the eggcorn I put before you. Merriam Webster informs us that an eggcorn is “a word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase either on its own or as part of a set expression.” 

One of the oft-repeated themes of these podcasts is that in today's public school districts, adult issues often get in the way of a focus on the children. The forces that focus on adults, blowing in and on the district, are varied, intense, and yes, sometimes hurricane and pandemic-like. For all the children to be served well, we instead must do all we can to emphasize and focus on each one of them. That is what these podcasts are all about. 

Districts are often like large dysfunctional families who sometimes need therapy. They are complex organizations with complicated communication and feedback patterns. I once worked in a district where the administration building was located on "Normal St." You can imagine the jokes about that!

Whether dancing with joy or dancing around and in between the mines (minds), serving in public education is full of reward and risk. Many minefields must be navigated, and many mindfields must be nurtured before arriving safely at the end of one's career. That is where I am now. Thanks for letting me share the rewards, the risks, and the rhythm of the dance. 

My very first job in public education was in 1972 when I was hired to drive a school bus in a tiny (600 students) rural central Texas school district. I had to learn how to teach the kids to duck and cover on the bus from the potential tornados that swept the area each spring. 

Twenty-eight years later, I was consulting with huge Miami Dade School District to help them redesign their school lunch program. The tragedy of the deaths of nine students in one year over the lunch period while eating off campus shocked the school board into closing the campuses at lunch time. I led the team that, under a grant from the Florida State Board of Education, helped the district redesign the tiny cafeterias and cooking areas to accommodate the massive influx of grumpy students, newly required to eat on campus. 

Six years later I was helping San Diego Unified School District reshape their physical plant operations. Several years later I was their board budget analyst, interim CFO, chief special projects officer, and finally deputy superintendent. I then retired and accepted a position as interim superintendent in the second largest border district in the United States. 

In between all of that I studied, worked in, with, and for about 100 districts and institutions of higher education from Anchorage to Apalachicola and from Salem to Seattle. I have spoken at national, regional, and state educational organizations from AASA, ASBO, ERDI, FCIS, CGCS, NAIA, NSBA, and a score or more alphabet soup-named groups. My favorite group of all was the Council of Great City Schools. I spent years of involvement as a vendor affiliate and member district leader in that august and rarely boring organization. 

One district named me its “vendor of the year.” Who knew there was such a thing? I have been called the superintendent’s ombudsman, the shadow superintendent, and over all those years probably spent more time in school board meetings than in sleeping, although the two were not mutually exclusive. Early on someone dubbed me an organizational anthropologist. I kind of liked that so I enrolled in graduate study in both anthropology and organizational development and behavior.

Through it all I have maintained my love for Mexican culture and history. So now I am retired in a small village in the high desert of Chihuahua. I took my first college level course in Spanish and Latin American culture at seventeen years of age in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Now at seventy-four years I am a month away from my thesis defense for my PhD in Mexican post-revolutionary history at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England! 

I tell you all of that background so you can better understand my passion for and the scope of my engagement in public schools over all these years. I invite you to join my friends Olivia, Noah, Omar, and Emma and me as together we explore the ins and outs, ups and downs, and joys and stresses of dancing in the mindfields. Check out our logo on Facebook, our website, or your favorite podcast site and you will meet Olivia and Noah, representing all the adults involved in the dance. Omar and Emma, two of our students,  represent those for whom and with whom we dance.

Together we will travel around the world of public education, leaving no challenge unmet, no conflict hidden from view, and no subject too controversial to be considered. In that sense, the joys of the journey into the unknown are often the unknown joys of the journey. I loved my work and enjoyed the journey. 

While there may be median and modal districts, I am pretty sure there is no such thing as an “average” district in the United States. There are urban and rural, huge and tiny, wonderfully and poorly run, focused and scattered in their mission, and districts caught up with trying to have “a spoon in every soup” – trying to be everything to everyone along with trying to do everything for everyone as well. That is an impossible task and can only lead to losing focus on the core mission of helping students learn. 

Tremendous forces act on a district, especially an urban district, to provide a wide variety of services to students and their families involving much more than basic education. Districts try to do their best to meet student needs, so they are better equipped physically, mentally, and emotionally to learn. These needs vary widely. Students from homes full of yelling and homes that are full of Yaleing are each served. Sometimes they are one in the same house. Basic skills are hard to teach when basic survival is what preoccupies students' minds.

I am confident most people would agree that a school district's primary mission is its students' education. I am not sure that many district stakeholders nationwide realize how very complicated and involved doing that is at this time. While districts exist to educate the children, they have morphed over time into organizations that do much more, weakening the focus on their core mission. Resources often do not match requirements. "Unfunded mandates" are the bane of the district resource manager.  I know . . . I was one.

I have worked with school boards, school committees, boards of trustees, boards of directors, even a school reform commission (the SRC in Philly). By whatever name they represented every possible point of view on the ideological educational spectrums. 

One Tuesday evening waiting for my turn to report in a board meeting I observed their decision to ban all moments of silence (prayers) at any district function. Two days later on Thursday I presented to a school board in a neighboring state where the opening prayer was given by the superintendent, lasted ten minutes and covered petitions on behalf of sick staff and students, requesting wisdom and sound judgment for the school board, patience, kindness, and discretion for the administration, and lots of concern for the spiritual well being of the US president and congress. Both districts operated under the same constitution with widely divergent interpretations of the same. So, it was and is in public education in the United States.

One night in a very rural school in rural Oregon, I experienced my first and only encounter with a lockdown at a school board meeting. Just before I was to give a report, the custodian of the school came running into the meeting, slammed the doors and announced that no one was to leave because the school was in lock-down. There was a bear in the parking lot! I learned to expect the unexpected at school board meetings, including bears, both literal and figurative inside and outside the board room!

I saw superintendents walk out, board members escorted out, and a local witch pronounce a curse on the district from the public podium. The unique thing about that situation was that a board member was also a genuine certified witch (no, really, I am serious). She assured everyone on the dais and in the audience not to worry because the podium witch did not have enough power to curse the entire district. 

I knew a national superintendent of the year who was shot and killed in his office a year or two later.  I worked with several senior district administrators who suffered heart attacks or strokes and died in their offices. School districts are places of great joy, and at times, even greater stress.

Monday, October 24, 2005, when I was consulting full-time with the Broward County Schools, Hurricane Wilma hit Fort Lauderdale, FL, with winds of up to 125 miles per hour. The district's headquarters, what detractors derisively labeled the "Crystal Palace," was turned into shattered crystal. The building suffered significant damage, and many floors were unusable. Many school campuses were also damaged.

After that, Broward County Public Schools, with 274,591 students and 278 schools, the seventh-largest district in the United States, had no teaching and learning for two weeks. Despite an excellent curriculum, teachers, and professional development, external forces brought learning to a halt. 

More recently, in 2020 and 2021 the Covid-19 virus turned the United States' public education system inside out. Districts struggled with managing the school year. Online learning expanded beyond its current competencies. Families were in turmoil over how to combine work and an expanded role in teaching their children. 

Ever since then internal forces, including ideological, financial, and parent involvement/stakeholder/board relationship controversies have dramatically challenged public education in the United States. Educational outcomes are increasingly uncertain. 

These are extreme examples, but they serve to remind the listener of these podcasts core thesis; that despite a district's best efforts, teaching and learning are subject to a whole host of external and internal factors that either enhance or inhibit classroom outcomes. Those forces extend way beyond the classroom to the district itself as a part of the community and nation. 

May these podcasts cause you to smile, reflect, and become better informed about what lies beyond the classroom in a US public school district. This institution frequently finds itself under fire from both its detractors and its devotees. If you are listening because you work for a district, you have my gratitude for your service. I trust these podcasts will help you better understand the place and/or role in which you labor. Some of you work directly with the students, others of you work directly with those who do. Whether custodian, budget analyst, or teacher, you are all educators. I trust these roughly twenty minute get-togethers will help you do your work well, with wisdom, discernment, and joy despite the challenges.

Others may be listening because you are disillusioned with, angry at, disappointed in, confused, or curious about public school districts. I hope these podcasts will help you understand the challenges and complexities and the joys those who serve in public education experience day after day.

Using the constructs of sociologist Kurt Lewin, public school districts face many forces for and against their work. For this dancer, the key to weathering these storms is found in the reality that everyone in the district, together with its community needs each other to focus laser-like on educating the students. Everything else is an appendage or distraction. Once we recognize that, we can all work together for the good of the students. Through all our differing outlooks and tribes – the one great unifier can and should be the student!

Thanks for tuning in to this, the first of our first season of podcasts. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast channel and let us know how we are doing on either our Facebook page at dancinginthemindfields.com (all one word) or on our website at the same address. Let’s all keep on dancing!