Vicki Caruana, Bill Ferriter, and others at the Teacher Leaders Network (among an increasing number of other online education communities) do a good job of describing teachers' interests, sentiments, and concerns. Together, they reach out to industry and public policy makers in order to influence product and policy decisions that may affect school students. I think most people support that effort and wish them well.

As a business person and a teacher, several things come to mind about why teachers and industry deciders talk past, rather than with each other, even when speaking face-to-face.

In short, educators and industrialists use different logic for assembling similar words. Using their own views, neither considers the other credible for making decisions that will affect their interests.

Business people expect little or no return on their investment in the conversation. Teachers expect business people "to understand" and help make their job easier to do what teachers think they should do, whether or not business people agree with teachers.

This situation appears to have produced an uneasy isolation that sometimes turns into a spitting contest and less frequently into cooperation. That said, business contributes about $2.5 billion a year to schools in the US and schools receive about $35 billion a year from public sources, about the sixth largest public "budget" in the world (depending on who counts what).

In the spirit of comity, I want to list a business person's view of teachers and education as a counterpoint to those posted by teachers and our supporters. I trust that teachers will consider that business people hold such ideas as sincerely and firmly as teachers hold theirs.

This list reflects a middle road, velvet glove description of what I've seen and heard reasonable, key business people say about teachers and schools. You've heard or read about these ideas spoken in public forums. Adding testimonials from other business people does not negate or balance the relevance of this list.

I think all teachers know these ideas. I urge each of us to consider them in order to tap the vast resources of industry to help resolve school issues of importance to our students.

1. Get real, Teachers. Show me something I don't already know about schools and their relationships to other parts of the world. Then, we may have something to talk about.

2. Don't bring me your problems. Any fool can criticize. Bring me your solutions. Show me what you've accomplished with what you have, so I know how much credibility to assign to your words.

3. Education does not mean the same thing as schooling. Take care of school and education will come along. That's what you're paid to do.

4. The context of schooling changed in 2002 with the introduction of the Tablet PC, probably not to return to any earlier context. The impact of this change will likely have more profound influences on what teachers do than any previous political or other action since the creation of the printing press and telephone.

5. Teachers now compete with a mass market of learning on demand. That is, almost anyone has the ability to go online and learn whatever they decide, when they decide to do so, and to whatever criteria each person sets for learning. show me how you have changed your classroom actions to compete with or complement that reality?

6. A geometric increase has occurred each of the last several years among public school administrators in moving to one-on-one learning in classrooms, as underway for example in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and lead by smaller schools in this country and countrywide schools in Asia.

7. Initiate something new in your school promptly, measure the results, then tell me what learning increases you accomplished. Refine what you did, redo it, then refine it again, etc. Figure out a way to do so within whatever rules you have in your school. There's always a way to do so. If you wait for someone else to go first, then you'll be behind. Remember, when chased by a lion, always make sure you run away with someone slower than yourself.

8. Above all, don't believe your own press releases. While you're as good as your last performance, someone else wants your place on your stage, and might take it from you unless you improve over last time.

That's a big load, but it's just an opening of what we as teachers can address to persuade others of our many good contributions we make daily to schooling.

First, though, those who decide to work with rather than against such business sentiments will find student learning increasing faster than students in other classes. That's OK. So far, each teacher can decide what results they want for their students. Yep, I think so. Y'all come back, ya' hear!

I'll stop for now.

Tablet PC Education Blog