Dear Friends and Colleagues

Many of you over the last four months have asked me, "Are you going to be coming back next year?" My answer has always been, "Yes, and if I change my mind I will let you know."

I am sending you this note to let you know that I have, in fact, changed my mind and will not be returning. Starting in September I will be teaching math at Lexington High School. At the end of this school year I went through a period of intense reflection about my experience in Lawrence the last five years. There were many positives. Probably the greatest positive is how wonderful it has been to work with you, my fellow teachers. In my career in business I never got the chance to work with such a creative, positive, unselfish group of talented people. I left work each day energized by my interactions with you. You generously shared your time, experience, and energy with me and I am grateful for it.

Another terrific positive was working with the kids of Lawrence. I have never met a group of such energetic, funny, and fun-to-be-with youngsters anywhere. As I am writing this a big smile is lighting up my face as I remember the many classroom "moments" - the laughs we shared, the connections we created - the moments where I knew that my presence was making a difference in their lives. I suppose that when I came here I knew that my presence **would** make a difference. But I never expected the difference their presence would make in **my** life. Anyway, these are the reasons that I would get up at 3 in the morning, arrive at school by 6 and stay sometimes to 8 at night. This is the reason I volunteered to tutor in the library after hours. I have never regretted that extra time I put in. So why would I consider leaving Lawrence? The answer is simple, though sad. After a year of seeing the Dream Team implement the Superintendent's 6-school plan, I have lost confidence in the leadership in the Lawrence Public Schools. I came to Lawrence to help MCAS scores improve. For a while, they did. But in the last several years the focus has shifted to developing six schools. I had an open mind about the six schools when it was proposed. I worked on the committee that put together the Vision Statement for the Math, Science, and Technology School. We were pleased with the statement and put a lot of effort into it. It was a good vision. I got up in front of you and sold this vision with passion and commitment. Last fall, it took only a few seconds for this vision statement to be discarded in its entirety. A completely new set of stakeholders entered the picture - a new Principal, the Superintendent's Eight Steps, representatives from the University of Lowell - with a competing set of agendas, none of them aware of (or even caring about) the tradeoffs and discussions that we had worked so hard on. The six-school plan is neutral in the sense that it can either improve student achievement, or make it worsen, depending on how it is implemented. A sensible way to implement it would be to centralize the services that each of the schools needs to provide, things like attendance gathering, ordering of supplies (such as copier paper), textbook distribution and storage, scheduling, computing, and the like. The point is to achieve economies of scale and manage these services for efficiency, with the smallest amount of specialized staff. The schools would be consumers, and would periodically rate the providers on the timeliness and quality of these services. The staff in each school would then be free to work as a faculty to improve instruction, fine-tune the curriculum, write grants, and develop partnerships with local businesses. If the goal is to improve student achievement, I am open to the suggestion that six schools could be a means toward achieving this goal. But it became clear to me last year that six schools is the goal in and of itself. You now have people designing six separate sets of forms, six separate discipline procedures, six different textbook distribution policies. There are teams writing six separate course descriptions. There will be six new, separate accreditation efforts. This will be a lot of effort. But wait. Didn't we just do some of this work? You would think that, with all the effort that has been expended in the last five years on accreditation, curriculum, common exams, and so forth, that these documents, which took so much effort to write, would at least be used as the starting point for any changes that needed to be made. Instead, when we left the old High School building last June, I found many of these binders in the trash. The ASRP posters are probably still on the walls. The new high schools will have no copies of common math exams - these were all thrown away. They will have no copies of the common math curriculum, unless one of the Principals had the foresight to go to the curriculum office and pick these out. The collective effort we put into these documents is measured in person-decades, and it is now gone.

They want us to volunteer for extra duty to recreate it.

Who will have time to worry about student achievement or MCAS?

My wife likes to watch the program "Antiques Road Show". You've probably seen it. Someone brings in an interesting article that they paid $20 for in a garage sale and finds out from an appraiser that it is worth $10,000. I always think about the person running the garage sale feeling himself fortunate that someone took away "that old thing" and paid him $20 to do it. My friends, there is a garage sale in progress in Lawrence. A lot of good, valuable experience, knowledge, and ideas are being given away, and the people in charge are congratulating themselves that they are finally rid of people like Andy Reusch and Carol Rosen and Nicole Shadeed. Since they undervalued the contribution of these people when they were there, they think that replacing them will be simple. They think that they can manage textbook distribution, for example, or scheduling, or the bell system. In my years in management in the software industry, we had a name for this kind of organization. It was called the Blaming Organization, to contrast it with a Learning Organization. In a Blaming Organization, problems are caused by bad people. The goal of management is to find the guilty parties and get rid of them. In a Learning Organization, problems are caused by bad process. They are analyzed to understand the defect in the process, and the process is updated. This type of organization avoids problems it has encountered before, and its performance gets better and better. In Blaming Organizations, things never get any better. Indeed, managers need "bad people" to get rid of to show their bosses what a good job they are doing. I've reached a point where I have tried all the ways I can think of to improve the High Schools. I talked to many of the Principals. I volunteered for homework help. I picked up garbage in the cafeteria. I walked the halls after hours to try and get freshmen back into their classes. But then I realized that the Superintendent was using my efforts, and those of others, as part of his media story to show that the staff is "enthusiastically redesigning the schools in Lawrence." That would be fine, but no such thing is actually happening. Our input is not being sought. And when we freely give it, it is being discarded. Too bad. I've still got a lot of ideas about how these problems could be fixed. Ideas that I have successfully applied, as a manager, in organizations the size of these schools. I guess I will just have to take my ideas and try to use them in Lexington, instead. Best of luck to you, my friends. I love you and will miss you and will think of you often. You are indeed a special breed. The students of Lawrence deserve your efforts. Stay in touch.

-- Allen Olsen