Why school leaders need poets: you can find a context for your daily work by reflecting on a truly meaningful personal vision.

In the high visibility world of school leadership, those who hold titles that imply decision-making, judgment and evaluation are constantly watched to be sure that words spoken match actions taken. The cliche about words being like toothpaste--once they're out they can't be put back into the tube--certainly applies to leadership situations.

The task of reflecting on a truly meaningful personal vision, as opposed to trendy words on a flip chart, can provide leaders with a context for their daily work. When hard decisions involving employees or students must be made, it is the personal vision and self-identity of the leader that provide meaningful context.

The internal statement, "I am making this hard call because it is best for the individual and the institution and is consistent with my belief that schools must have people of character in the classroom" will lead to more job satisfaction than making a decision based only on the rules of the job.

Spending time with students, parents and staff as a listener builds positive relationships. Information is infinite, and the more that is provided the more is received. While it was once taught that there was strength in the "need to know" theory, Margaret Wheatley and others have explained that schools and districts are natural systems that grow with new information and ideas and atrophy with closed communication and distrust.

With new information technologies, it is unlikely that topdown secretiveness will lead to higher productivity. The skillful sharing and receiving of information is the role of the enlightened leader.

Vision in a leader is most powerful when it brings to the district or the school a sense of possibility and hopefulness. It is certainly not hard to find cynicism, but the dark side of life doesn't inspire others to do their best work. It would be better to read "Good Poems," an amazing anthology of readable poetry compiled by Garrison Keillor, to find ideas to inspire optimism in the leader's vision. For example, this gem:

Sometimes
By Sheenagh Pugh

   Sometimes things don't go, after all,
   From bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
   Faces down frost;green thrives, the crops don't fail,
   Sometimes a man aims high, an, d all goes well.
   A people sometimes will step back from war;

   Elect an honest man; decide they care
   Enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
   Some men become what they were born for.

   Sometimes our best efforts do not go
   Amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
   The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
   That seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Another book for the educational leader interested improving relationships and productivity is the anthology compiled by Bill Moyers entitled "The Language of Life, A Festival of Poems." Of special note is the poet James Autry, until 1991 the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He is a moving and inspirational writer whose poetry takes place in offices like those of school leaders. In his outstanding work, "Love and Profit," he describes the importance of relationships.

Threads

By James Autry

   Sometimes you just connect,
   like that,
   no big thing maybe
   but something beyond the usual business stuff
   It comes and goes quickly
   so you have to pay attention,
   a change in the eyes
   when you ask about the family,
   a pain flickering behind the statistics
   about a boy and a girl in school,
   or about seeing them, every other Sunday.
   An older guy talks about his bride,
   a little affectation after twenty-five years.
   A hot-eyed achiever laughs before you want him to.
   Someone tells about his wife's job
   or why she quit working to stay home.
   An old joker needs another laugh on the way
   to retirement.
   A woman says she spends a lot of her salary
   on an au pair
   and a good one is hard to find
   but worth it because there's nothing more important
   than the baby.
   Listen.
   In every office you hear the threads
   of love and joy and fear and guilt,
   the cries for celebration and reassurance,
   and somehow you know that connecting those threads
   is what you are supposed to do
   and business takes care of itself.

The gut-wrenching tasks leaders face

When faced with the difficult relationships of human resources work, the school leader will also find support in Autry's poem "On Firing a Salesman." The pain of the hard personnel decision that all leaders face is reflected in his line, "It's a little like murder, taking his life."

In the commentary on that poem in the Moyers' anthology, Autry said of the hard tasks that affect relationships: "It's gut-wrenching; it breaks your heart; you're taking something from in a person; in a way, you're taking their life--and no one has ever said it's all right to feel terrible about that."

As Autry says, in leadership it's all connected by the threads. He also reminds us that the other side of leadership is that we also "get permission to celebrate and to be happy about the pleasure that business can provide."

Several years ago at a California School Boards Association Conference, Jimmy Santiago Baca was a keynote speaker. He brought most of the audience to tears. Baca learned to read in prison and went on to receive the American Book Award. His poetry is about relationships and incredible vision, but it is also about the power of information.

Our schools didn't see his talent or give him the information he needed to learn to read, so now he shows us how we can reach students in our schools that have been, like Jimmy Santiago Baca, abandoned, are on the streets or are incarcerated.

It was the book, the word, the poetry that gave Baca the courage to change his life. In describing the power of the word, he says, "Oh, it caught me up in the fiercest typhoon I have ever been in and from which I have never escaped. I have continually swirled like a leaf."

There are also powerful thoughts about leadership and information in Baca's Black Mesa Poems and his moving autobiography, "A Place to Stand." This poem is especially meaningful for thoughtful leaders:

Work We Hate and Dreams We Love

By Jimmy Santiago Baca

   Every morning
   Meiyo revs his truck up
   and lets it idle, Inside the small adobe house,
   he sips coffee
   while his Isleta girlfriend
   Cristi
   Brownbags his lunch.
   Life is filled with work
   Meiyo hates,
   and while he saws, 2 x 4's,
   trims lengths of 2 x 10's on a table saw,
   inside his veins another world
   in full color etches
   a blue sky on his bones,
   a man following a bison herd,
   and suddenly his hammer becomes a spear
   he tosses to the ground
   altering a sound we do not understand.

What powerful words about the world of work and dreams for leaders of schools to contemplate! If we give students the information they need to learn to read and write, perhaps they won't, like Baca, have to find that information and power in the penal system.

Baca was able to transcend our limitations; his poems can teach us the power of giving ideas, words and time for reflection to the schools and districts we are paid to lead.

Every child getting better every day

It is the vision, the sharing of information and the cultivation of relationships that will allow us to leave no child behind. Certainly, we will do our work and teach the curricula, try to raise test scores and teach to the standards. But those tasks will not be accomplished by leaders with verbal directives and insensitive hearts.

It is the leader with a vision of every child getting better every day, the skills to inform and be informed, and the likeability to build morale both within the school and the community who will meet the challenges in today's complex educational environments.

If it seems that as we age as leaders it all gets too hard and the tasks seem to pile higher as we forget which problem to address next, we can take heart from Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who writes in his new collection, "Sailing Alone Around the Room," the following:

Forgetfulness

By Billy Collins

   The name of the author is the first to go
   followed obediently by the title, the plot,
   the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
   which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even
   heard of.

   It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
   decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
   to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

   Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good bye,
   and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
   and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
   something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
   the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

   Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
   it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
   not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

   It has floated away down a dark mythological river
   whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
   well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
   who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a
   bicycle.

   No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
   to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
   No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
   out of a love poem you used to know by heart.

The human condition

Leadership has never been easy, and poets have always been there to remind us of the human condition. They use an economy of language to tell us that as leaders we will be followed because of our visions of a better world for all children, our sharing of ideas and speaking of inspirational words, and our understanding that it's all about building relationships.

Giving voice to the voiceless

Inspirational poets encourage us not to leave anyone behind, as Jimmy Santiago Baca said in recalling his school days when poverty and degradation seemed overwhelming:

"I was a witness, not a victim. I was a witness for those who for one reason or another would never have a place of their own, would never have an opportunity to make their lives stable enough because resources were not available or because they just could not get it together. My job was to witness and record the 'it' of their lives, to celebrate those who don't have a place in this world to call home. For those people, my journals, poems and writing are home. My pen and heart chronicle their hopes, doubts, regrets, loves, despairs and dreams.... My role as witness is to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one."

And that's why school leaders need poets.

Walt Buster is the retired superintendent of the Clovis Unified School District.