I wonder if we played project chicken for too long in schools. I have rarely seen an administrator go to the school board and deliver a presentation declaring "we are in deep shit". I don't know that we lie, but we certainly do try to only report the positives and keep the real problems we are dealing with at school quiet. We tend to try and make bad news seem not so bad. We don't share our real problems with the school board and so at times we fail to get the resources we need. I have seen bond election after bond election fail because the schools are kept looking nice on the outside and school officials refrain from telling school boards (and thus the public) that the building is falling apart.
I wonder if I were to stand outside of a teacher's room and banged pans when they were lecturing for ninety minutes that might change their behavior? Classical conditioning at its best.
