LETTER: Horsing around at the school district

I won’t pretend this is original with me — it’s not. I stumbled across it while cleaning out my desk, and it was so relevant to the educational approach in Clark County that I wanted to share it. Whoever the author is, he or she really nailed it.

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed from generation to generation, says that when riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. In modern education and government, however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Threatening the horse with termination.

4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.

6. Lowering the standards, so that the dead horse can be included.

7. Re-classifying the horse as “living impaired.”

8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.

10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.

11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

12. Declaring that a dead horse does not have to be fed; it is less costly, carries the lowest overhead, therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

13. Re-writing the expected performance requirements for all horses.

14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Strange how in looking back at education in the past 10 years or so in Clark County, we can see evidence of attempts at all or most of theses strategies, isn’t it? And even stranger to see how poorly they have worked. Somehow, the dead horses stay dead, and the outcome does not get any better.