When You Don't Know How to Dream

I had a meeting today with a few other district principals, some higher-ed folks and district personnel. The purpose of the meeting was to examine the budget formulas to create an ideal high school budget for a Philadelphia school. We were told to dream big, to imagine having what we needed to really meet the state standards. What we were doing was to used as part of the conversations going on about school finance reform in PA. A decidedly worthy exercise for a few hours over an evening.

I was the least experienced principal in the room. And -- and let me be perfectly and powerfully clear here -- the other principals in the room are colleagues I respect and admire. One of them is someone I've called on many times for counsel. But I've also been lucky enough, through my experiences in educational technology, to work with an incredibly diverse group of educators from public to private, urban to suburban and of a wide geographic range as well. That perspective is invaluable.

Because what struck me about this meeting was how hard it was for these bright, dedicated career Philadelphia educators to dream about having the necessary resources to really teach.

Let me say that again: These excellent principals who have, for their entire careers, figured out how to bring value from every dollar in their budget, when given permission to dream had a hard time even imagining what that would look like.

That lasted for a good portion of the meeting, although once you offer a starving man food, stand back when he starts to eat, as we all did get into the spirit of the exercise. (And for the record, there were definitely times when my own lack of vision about what is possible in school funding hit me as well. So by no means was I immune, either, even as I talking about making sure we could dream.) But even once we could get there, I could see them, with almost every line-item we went through, thinking immediately about every way they've been made to stretch a dollar. And I can't count how many times, as we created our ideal budget, one of the principals laughed and said, "I can't even imagine having this much."

And for the record, we didn't dream that big. By my rough guess, our ideally funded school would spend roughly the same as the wealthy Philadelphia suburban districts -- and the only reason we would spend that much is because we actually factored in what a fully funded special education program for Philadelphia would look like.

Why bring this up? Because it speaks to what has been gnawing at me of late -- we have to ask ourselves what our system of education -- especially urban education -- is doing to the good people within it. And for those of us in ed-tech, we have to ask ourselves why others may not be as quick to embrace what we have. It may not be reluctance or even an unwillingness to dream. It may be that we have to help the very good people in all of our systems take the first steps to be able to do so.