What is obvious to anyone who steps into the halls and classrooms on the first day of school?  The floors are very shiny, having several coats of wax, clean, and ready for the start of the new year.   For me, there is another more palpable kind of shininess.

Most notably, it is evidenced on the faces of little kindergartners and 1^st graders.  There is a sense of possibility and hope like no other when you gaze into the eyes of children who appear on the first day of school.  Their faces tell quite a story, a story of unvarnished joy and limitless optimism about the future.  It is in fact the future that sits in front of us when we visit classrooms on that first day.  All of the politics, the hidden and not so hidden agendas, calls for reform, tightening of spending, and complicated formulas for school success are not in evidence when one visits a primary grade classroom on the first day.

The harsh realities of how the adult world can render the simple and elegant exchange of ideas in the form of teaching and learning are difficult to detect among the children that I saw when I walked into classrooms through the district where I serve as Superintendent.  Not for a moment do I minimize the seriousness of the challenges that we face to deliver high quality instruction; to meet the individual needs that an expert educator provides when he or she effectively designs lessons that support all learners.

Inundated as we are with an onslaught of corporate interests and voices that compete for the morale high ground to offer up any number of prescriptive “fixes” for all that ails public schools, I can safely say that yesterday, on what was the first day of the new school year I was able to bear witness to many wonderful moments.  Above all else it became clear that we have tremendous power, and at times an overwhelming responsibility, to shield our children and teachers from the slings and arrows being thrown at public education in America today.