About Education 208

I have been in education 20 years now and I’m passionate about education. I’m currently the principal of an online high school here in Idaho, but I’ve worked in 2 states, 6 districts, and I’ve taught Social Studies and English courses in every grade level from 7th to 12th. My specialty was teaching history and my favorite teaching assignment was when I taught 5 sections of AP European History. I felt called to be an educator and it's been one of the great joys of my life. There is a scene in Saving Private Ryan where Sergeant Miller mentions that “back home, when people found out I was a teacher, they were like, ‘of course.'” I hope that’s me. I do this because I love being around kids, and I love my community. When you teach well, you improve both.

I created this blog because as a practicing educator, I have a lot of opinions about education, and I strongly believe that the viewpoint of those of us in the trenches needs to be heard by those above us making the rules. There’s a picture of Norman Rockwell’s 4 Freedoms paintings here because this inspires me to speak out. The 4 Freedoms comes from a speech FDR made in 1941 to help define what made us different from our enemies in WWII and to describe what we were fighting for. Often when you see this image, you see the words, “Ours to fight for…” somewhere. Yep. Nothing in life comes for free, and if we want to enjoy these freedoms, we have to stand up for them. Luckily, I believe that the biggest way we do that is to tell our truth in a way that others can recognize it and it can add to their truth. We all have unique viewpoints, and I hope to share the viewpoint of educators here with the goal to make our education system better.

Over my 20 years in education, I’ve taught in large, traditional school districts then later I became a charter teacher in the online environment. If I would have been asked early in my career if I would have ever jumped ship into the charter universe, I 'd have laughed because I love the traditional school universe and what I did. While I came into the charter world by fluke, as I practiced it, I realized that nothing had really changed...good education is good education. So here are my core beliefs about school at this point:

• Traditional schools and traditional districts are great. I don’t buy into the notion that education is somehow broken, and I think many teachers and many schools and districts in the traditional world are doing a stellar job. I also believe that if our measurement standards were better, people would realize that in many cases, traditional schools out-compete charter schools.

• Charter schools and charter districts are great. What’s awesome about charter schools and districts is that they give people a choice, and sometimes, that choice is badly needed. If you’re in and out of the hospital with a chronic illness, practically the only thing that can happen to you in the traditional system is that you fail. If you’re in an online school, you take your laptop with you and school. Just like with traditional teachers and schools, many charter teachers and many charter schools are doing a stellar job.

• If schools were measured better, we’d better see the good they are doing. Typically, our measurement standards for schools (usually created by non educators) are pretty horrific and yield little or no understandable information truly connected with what is happening in schools. If our measurement standards were better, we’d have a much more clear picture of what is really happening with schools.

• School choice, coupled with a clear measurement system, is the answer. Charter schools insert the marketplace into education and the Invisible Hand does the rest. If you don’t listen to your stakeholders and create a quality education system, they leave. This is true whether you are traditional or charter. People go where they want to go, and if you don’t make them happy, they vote with their feet. As it should be. Families should be able to choose the schools they use, and schools should have to to create high enough quality to entice families into choosing them. 

• The primary role of the state is to get the public good information about their schools. Currently, the state does a pretty terrible job of this, but their primary role should be to judge schools in such a simplistic way that even Forrest Gump can understand them, and then to do nothing else. If people have accurate and understandable information on schools, and the ability to choose schools, good schools will thrive and bad will wither. The state doesn’t have to intervene and shut down schools that aren’t performing...school choice will do that in a much more organic way.

So there’s the manifesto and agenda here. Education 208 is mainly about the school system here in Idaho, but my goal is post as much content as educators will give me to create a more clear picture of what is really going on in education...which is something I think most laypeople don’t understand. There’s no PAC here, no Foundation, no money period. While that’s not here, hopefully what ends up here is authentic and represents what’s really going on in our education system.

Clayton Trehal