America’s schoolchildren do not have a fighting chance of excelling academically if educators continue to compromise their professional ethics, focus on their hidden and selfish agendas, and fail to adequately address the needs of students. There has not been a more critical time in our nation’s history wherein we need school boards, superintendents, and school administrators to exhibit strong, honest, and decisive leadership that employs the highest standards as they evaluate stakeholders at every level. Our public school challenges call for school leaders who are courageous enough to move beyond the nepotism and quid pro quo of years past. They must demonstrate a renewed commitment to confronting the systems and forces in local schools that have stifled the academic progress of our youth for decades. This will require removing personnel who are not qualified and are poorly trained and dismantling pedagogical structures that are not effective at yielding academic success in our classrooms. School cultures will need to be reformed to generate academic protocols that are conducive to high academic achievement for students across the learning spectrum. To hold education leaders accountable to their professional mandates, new external partnerships and alliances must be formed among civic, business, religious, and community leaders who espouse high academic expectations for every child in every school. It really will require the whole village to properly educate all of our schoolchildren because we are witnessing a deterioration in the ethics and morals of school officials at all levels in some communities.

The overarching challenge to accomplishing many of these goals is the sad reality that far too many school boards, superintendents, and administrators are beholden to their friends and cronies, which essentially renders these school leaders incapable of making hard decisions which affect the jobs and livelihoods of people they have known or worked with for years. The elephant in the room is the degree to which cronyism, nepotism, hidden agendas, and corruption are threatening the future of our schoolchildren. Unfortunately, this reality has been exposed in some of the lowest performing school districts in the country. Who would have ever guessed that the adults would prove to be one of the biggest obstacles to implementing higher standards and accountability in schools? We are witnessing cover-ups and schemes that leave the average observer speechless and shocked. I never thought I’d live to see the day where the education of our youth would be used so casually like a political football by people who claim they care about those students who are underserved. The fact that grownups are so willing to use K-12 education as a proxy for securing personal favors and maintaining political allegiances is beyond comprehension. The state of the American economy and the slippery slope that we may be on globally would seem to be reason enough for people to at least act like they’re serious about the quality of public education. Sadly though, we’re finding out that some leaders in education are willing to adopt unethical (and even criminal) practices and behaviors despite their effects on the lives of schoolchildren.