The outside consultant

 

 A consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and then keeps the watch.  Carl Ally

My friend Scott McLeod on his blog Dangerously Irrelevant has been writing about good practices for school districts using "outside helpers." If you are an educational leader, his posts are a must read.

Scott's advice made me reflect a bit on my days when I'd be asked to "consult" - mainly in the form of doing technology or library program evaluations for school districts. I did it often enough - and with what I felt was mixed success - to think about how schools could get their best value from me. While not as comprehensive or thoughtful as Scott's posts, this is what I wrote in my handbook,What Gets Measured, Gets Done (2019), about "helpers"...

The outside consultant

Should a district hire a consultant from outside the district to help evaluate its library media program? Since I have often served as a consultant myself, you need to know that my advice may be somewhat self-serving. But here it is anyway…

There are a number of very good reasons not to hire a consultant to help in the evaluation process:

• Good consultants are expensive. (An alternative to a hired gun is to have a reciprocal agreement with another district to trade external evaluators. Accreditation associations often use volunteer evaluators from member schools. These folks know they in turn will get volunteers when they are evaluated.)

• Consultants may not understand the culture, philosophy, and goals of the district.

• Consultants may come to the evaluation with a set of prejudices not in keeping with district philosophy or professional best practices.

• Consultants may not come from recent practice in the field.

• Consultants can only discover a limited amount of information during a site visit. One or two conversations or experiences may play too important a factor in the consultant’s final recommendations.

 Other than that, we are charming and lovable people and can add value to the evaluation process:

• Consultants can bring a sense of objectivity to the evaluation.

• Consultants can bring expertise in building good programs to the district.

• Consultants can lend credibility and validity to the work done by the district evaluation team if the administrative team and school board regard them as impartial and expert.

• Consultants can bring knowledge of current best practices and future trends in the field, and may have knowledge of what other schools are doing that is innovative and effective.

If you want to get the most bang for your buck from a consultant:

• Spell out exactly what result you expect from his/her involvement. (Site visit, written report, follow-up, etc.)

• Have good information for the consultant to use. Inventories, survey results etc, should be done prior to his/her involvement. (Although a good consultant should be able to provide sources for good evaluative tools.) The consultant should only be analyzing the data and making recommendations, not gathering it.

• Get recommendations from others who have used the consultant. Ask about their communication skills, timeliness, reliability, and the usability of the consultant’s product.

• Hire someone with credibility and recent experience in the library media field.

When I visit a district as a program evaluator, my main objective is to help the head of the library media/technology department get across whatever message he or she needs to have the administration and board hear. Most people for whom I have worked have a very realistic picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their programs. 

I also attempt to answer genuine questions these folks might have: Why are more classes not using technology for research purposes? To what extent do our physical facilities help or hinder our library media programs? How can we better use the computers we have in our elementary schools? Do our print collections meet the needs of our students and staff? How can we better allocate our media and technology dollars? Should our budgets support more e-resources? How can I make our makerspace more effective? Does the library program support the learning management system and personalized learning efforts?

The main point here is that the better the district knows what it wants from an outside consultant evaluator, the better off that person is able to provide it. And this leaves everyone satisfied and the district with useful information that can be used to improve.

My government handouts

The debate rages over the government’s role in providing assistance to its citizens in the form of welfare payments, socialized medicine, educational support, etc. While the economic conservative in me says, “Let people work for what they want,” the humanist in me understands many people are in straits that I cannot even imagine - and that no one in our rich nation should go hungry or without shelter.

For the most part, I have been able to live a good life without much largess from Uncle Sam. But before I get on my high horse and complain about supporting indolence using my tax dollars, I thought I should reflect on times that I’ve gotten “free money” from the rest of you taxpayers.

National Defense Loan: As a student in the early 1970s, I applied for and received a National Defense Loan for college payments of $500. Today that seems like a piddly sum, but at the time, quarterly instate tuition at the University of Northern Colorado was less than $150. What made this a gift was that after graduation, I had $200 of the loan forgiven since I was teaching in an economically deprived area (rural Iowa). 

Food stamps: My wife and I applied for food stamps during our freshman year of college, much to the disgust of my archconservative father-in-law. He did wind up signing the paper that attested to our “financial emancipation” meaning that although we were under 21 we received no support from our families. As I remember, we received $30 booklets for two or three months. I was embarrassed to use the coupons when paying for groceries and thankfully never was unemployed long enough after that to use them again.

Cash for Clunkers: In 2009, President Obama announced a government program that incentivized trading low-mileage vehicles in for high mileage cars and trucks. At the time, I was driving a used, older model Ford Ranger pickup that got about 16mpg. And had a cooling system that was rapidly going downhill. I managed to coax the old beast into the local Toyota dealer where I got $4000 for it, lowering the cost of my new Yaris that got nearly 30mph to only $12,000. The $4000 came from the feds; the Ranger went to the junkyard. My grandson still drives the Yaris.

Stimulus check: A year or so ago I got a small check to help stimulate the virus impacted economy. I did not need it so immediately wrote a check for the same amount to the local food shelter. 

Indirectly I have been the recipient of government spending as well. Instate tuition rates come to mind. There may come a day where I wind up withdrawing more from Social Security and Medicare than I paid in. And I am sure there are many other ways I get more bang for my buck than I realize.

It’s fair to argue about who should get government assistance. What is considered a poverty level? What form of assistance should be provided? How do we use assistance to change peoples lives for the better through education, training, and health care, not just giving them the ability to live day-to-day in reduced circumstances? 

But it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that they have never been the recipient of government spending.  

Cartoon source

Writing as a measure of mental acuity

Im glad I got a second chanse to be smart becaus I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this world and Im grateful that I saw it all for a littel bit. I dont know why Im dumb agen or what I did wrong maybe its becaus I dint try hard enuff. Closing of Flowers for Algernon

A powerful story I read when in high school was Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon. The narrator, who has an intellectual disability, is the subject of an experiment to cure that disability. The cure works - but only temporarily - and by the end of the story, he is back to his original status, but now with an awareness of his limitations.

Charlie’s writing reflects that growth and then decline in his cognitive abilities. Poor spelling and fragmented sentences both begin and end his tale. Keyes's use of the first person narrative to demonstrate Charlie's mental capacities is pure genius - and probably why I remember this story after 50+ years. 

As an English teacher, I tried to remind my students of the “why” of good grammar, spelling, and composition. “You will be a more effective communicator if you write and speak well!” and “People will doubt your intelligence if your communications contain spelling and grammatical errors.” How many kids were persuaded by my “why” arguments and how many just studied subject-verb agreement just to pass the test, I don’t want to know. But I personally believed in my “why” and felt that as a teacher, I had a mission as well as a job.

As I write this, as I write today, as I approach my eighth decade in only a few short months, I wonder if those who read these words may be evaluating my aging intellectual skills. Thankfully spell checkers have become automatic. Grammar checkers fuss at me now and then. AI has somewhat slowed the appearance of aging in writing, just as lane controls and automatic braking has slowed my driving incompetence.

What AI has yet to do is help me maintain the quality of thoughts, depth of my insights, or the originality of my ideas. The content in writing is, after all, what matters. 

As I look back on my writing history of books, articles, and even blog posts, I sometimes surprise myself that it was actually me who wrote that stuff. Some of it is pretty darned good and I wonder if I have the same writing capabilities today. Much of what I wrote about stemmed from real world problems, changes, and challenges in my work as a librarian and technology director. Nothing like writing about a dilemma in order to help clarify one’s own thinking - and having the audacity to believe others might be interested in some of my observations.

My happy retirement world does not present such challenges. The need to get a contractor to finish a siding job on the house does not have the same degree of importance that library budget cuts once had. I can avoid difficult people rather than figure out strategies to deal with them. I’ve not yet found a mission that rivales transforming libraries with technology that once gave me purpose. The gremlin that is my natural inclination to indolence is no longer trapped in his cave.

Perhaps that’s what senility really is: the loss of mental acuity due to lack of use. So, dear readers, if u deetet a slide in my riting, let me no.

For some reason I keep singing in my head Paul Simon’s lyrics Believe we're gliding down the highway, When in fact we're slip slidin' away