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In June, two towering figures in education and on the LFA Board retired: Paul Houston of AASA and Warlene Gary of the national PTA.

I recently interviewed Houston about the state of public schools, the state of school reform, his vision for the future of public education, and his own legacy after 14 years at the helm of the American Association of School Administrators.  (My tribute to Warlene Gary will appear in this space next week.)

In the interview, Houston describes the failure of too many recent reform efforts to address 21st-century challenges, the danger of looking to China for guidance on education policy, the American education system's abiding faith in second chances, the evolving role of the superintendent, and the reasons for his famous bloody-mindedness on matters of school reform.

Hear highlights of Houston's thoughts on the good, bad and ugly of school reform (5 minutes), or check out the "Reform Transcript" below:

Listen to highlights from his reflections on his legacy (4 minutes), or check out the "Legacy Transcript" below:

Or listen to the following excerpts from the full interview:  

• The Changes Houston Has Seen (2:02)
• Resisting an Impoverished Vision of Schooling (3:00)
• Houston's Willingness to Tilt at Windmills (1:33)
• Breaking Schools out of the Industrial Paradigm (3:27)
• Will China and India Give Us a Thumping? (3:36)
• Superintendents: Leaders for a New Century (4:30)
• The Lessons of Accountability in Ireland (2:56)
• Reflecting on Houston's Legacy (3:13)
• Houston's Future: Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Remaining "A Pain in the Butt" (2:16)

REFORM TRANSCRIPT

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  How has public education changed since you first became an educator?

HOUSTON:  I think there's been a narrowing of vision-not just a narrowing of the curriculum, but a real narrowing of vision about what education is about.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  This narrowing of vision, then, where does it come from?

HOUSTON:  It comes from education being viewed as more instrument than as a good in and of itself.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  I've heard you say also, in other contexts, that we have a terrific education system as long as we had it for a former century. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that comment.

HOUSTON:  The schools we have are perfectly designed to give us the results we're getting.  If you really wanted every child to be highly successful you would not design a school program that lasts six hours a day and takes two or three months off in the summer.  But we do that because, once upon a time, people had to work on farms.  We've never changed the design for a different kind of reality and yet somehow we've imposed that on the old reality of the structure and the form of how we do education.

Then, our assumptions about what school reform ought to look like are, "Let's make school harder, and let's make them more of everything and harder of everything."  I don't think that's necessarily the solution, because education is fundamentally about motivation.

I always thought one of the great conversations that's never been had in this country would be conversations with local communities about how to create schools kids want to go to.  It really gets to the core of motivation and creating meaningful, engaging learning environments for kids.  So until we get a system that gets more into personalizing, more into motivation and that sort of thing, I think we're going to keep missing the boat. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  You've made comments on a related topic, and that is the fear that so many people have that we're going to get a thumping from China and India because we haven't produced the same number of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists as they have.  Are we in trouble?

HOUSTON:  We're in trouble if we keep thinking that because the fact is, we'll never produce enough engineers and scientists because [China and India] only have to produce a percentage of their population as scientists and engineers to swamp us.  So it's not about numbers, it's about the quality.  And part of that quality is maintaining a sense of ingenuity and creativity among our people, because that's the place we've always been best.

We have an entire education system historically built on the concept of forgiveness.  Because we allow people do-overs.  There's a place in our system for people like me who didn't learn how to read till he was in the third grade.  There are places in our system for people who go all the way through high school and don't see college in their future, and then when they're 20 or 21 decide, "You know what?  I think I could go to college.  I should go to college.  I want to do something that's going to require that."  We have places historically in our system that allows for that.  And a lot of the other countries around the world do not have that.

That's one of the reasons I've railed against high-stakes testing.  High-stakes testing has a price-that if you fail the consequences of that failure are much greater.  So what we have is a very inefficient, very sloppy system based upon this concept of forgiveness.  But if we lose that concept of forgiveness, we've lost something fundamentally American. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  How is the role of the superintendent, then, changed-or rather, how does it have to change given that we've got some things we want to preserve, like the system of second chances, and other things we really think we need to transform, like the calendar and other kinds of assumptions about learning?

HOUSTON:  It's now about becoming a superintendent of learning, and not a superintendent of schools.  That requires you to focus on not the place of learning, but the processes of learning.  And many of those processes are about relationships and connections that have to go outside the school.  So superintendents have to become much more adept at connecting to all these other places around the schools that may have a role to play in the learning process, and [at] creating this network of support for the children and, in some cases, the families that the schools serve.  Schools are uniquely situated, geographically and psychologically, in the center of communities, to start rebuilding community structure.  But it takes a very different attitude on the part of leaders of the system.

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  You've mentioned other countries you've seen that have different systems of accountability that are very legitimate.  You've talked about, I think, Ireland.  Do you want to tell me more about Ireland?

HOUSTON:  The thing about Ireland...There's a couple aspects to Ireland['s accountability system] that really struck me.  It's a collaborative model between the federal government and the local school.  It's a broad-based model.  It doesn't just look at student testing.  It looks at a whole range of things that the basic schools ought to be about, like connection to the community, provision of a broad curriculum...All these other things that they think are important.  [The government goes] in and works with the school to assess how that's going, together, and then, once they've identified areas of weakness, the role shifts into how you build capacity to deal with it.  Well, that strikes me as being terribly intelligent.

Because, first of all, you acknowledge it's a team operation.  It's not one group checking on the other group, determining their strengths and weaknesses, and then leaving them on their own devices to fix it.  It seems to be working pretty well.  Their economy is doing real well, they have a very high literacy rate there...I'm just saying that before we lock ourselves into this one model and say, "Well, this is the way you do accountability," we ought to take a little look at some of these other places and say, "Well, there may be some elements that we could learn from other people."

LEGACY TRANSCRIPT

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  As you think over your 14 years at AASA, are there any particular accomplishments that you really are especially proud of?

HOUSTON:  You know, that's a hard one for me, because I don't dwell on that sort of stuff very much.  I guess I would point to a couple of things that I feel good about.

One is that in many ways I think the organization is a very different organization today than it was 14 years ago.  We've become a much more modern organization than we were 14 years ago in terms of how we look at our own internal diversity, our own way of doing things, our way we govern ourselves, and all those sort of things.  And we did that without really losing our old members and the people who were there under a different system.  We've been able to make that transition as an organization.  And I think it's very well positioned for my successor to come in now and build off of that.  So I feel very good about that.  That was a much more complex undertaking than probably most people would realize from the outside.

I think the other-I won't take the credit for creating it, but I will take credit for being a good steward of it-is that we really are an organization of courage.  We are willing to stand up and do things because we think they're right, not because they're expedient.  And I think we're respected.  We've never had to apologize to our members for positions we've taken.  We've never had to say, "We really blew that one," or, "We weren't courageous enough on that one."  So I'm very, very proud of that.

I think probably from a personal standpoint-this is more personal than organizational, although it's built into the organization in terms of how we operate-I think we've been a thought leader.  I think we do look out of the box.  We do come up with different ways of looking at the same stuff.  And I think that's not only affected our members, but I think it's affected my colleagues around town here.

I think I've, at least over the last 14 years, established myself here, in this role, as someone who won't necessarily go along with the prevailing wisdom or the conventional wisdom, and what's prevailing-the sort of flow of things-if I thought it was wrong.  And I think more of us have to do that.  More of us have to say, "Wait a minute.  You know, I know this is politically expedient, but it's wrong."

Also, I think we, as educators, have to start directing the conversation in new ways.  A lot of the writing that I've tried to do over the years has been to try to frame some of these discussions with different language and with a different perspective, so at least people can stop and think about whether there's another way to think about some of these issues than the way we're currently doing it.

But it takes a lot more than one person.  It takes a lot of people doing that, and it takes a lot of people doing that consistently and having the courage of their convictions to stand up and say, "This isn't right."  I guess there's a little Don Quixote in me, and I think if more educators had a little bit more Don Quixote in them and were willing to tilt the windmills, maybe we'd knock some windmills down. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS:  So what's on your own horizon?

HOUSTON:  I'm not going to stop being a pain in the butt.  I'm constitutionally incapable of stopping that.

Personally what I'm going to do is move to Tucson, Arizona.  I have a home there that I bought a few years ago in preparation for a time when I would not want to be doing this job any more.  And I plan to do a lot more writing.  I'd like to continue to do some speaking, so I'm available for bar mitzvahs and weddings and that sort of thing.

But I'd like to do some speeches, because I like to stay in contact with this field.  Maybe a little consulting, but the focus of my work will be around writing in general, and I'd like to broaden some of the writing.  I'll continue to write about some of these issues-about education and that sort of thing-but I want to do more long pieces, books and that sort of stuff.

One of the roles I'll be taking on is I'm going to be president of the Center for Empowered Leadership, which is a little organization that a friend and I created a few years ago which looks at the spiritual issues of leadership.  I'll be emeritus executive director of AASA, whatever that means.  We're not sure.  I think it means old fart. 

I think the thing that has been perhaps more fun for me than almost anything is [receiving] letters and having people come up to me at the conference and things like that-[people] that I don't know, never met, and to have them say, "You know, you impacted my work.  I consider you a role model.  I read your column every month.  I use it with my staff and I share it with my community, and it makes me think differently."

I've had a lot of that this year, which is a wonderful way to go out.