The Nameplate Slides Out: RETIREMENT

Thirty years in P-20 education, and what I'm taking with me on the way to the parking lot

After thirty years, I am walking away from P-20 educator preparation. Teaching, administration, professing, all of it. I'd like to say I'm doing it with the dignified restraint of a man who has made peace with his career.

Looked up, and I was older.

I am doing it with the energy of a man who has read his last accreditation binder.

For the uninitiated, P-20 refers to pre-kindergarten through the doctorate. That's the whole ladder. Thirty years in, I have taught, evaluated, credentialed, mentored, or personally apologized to a human being at every rung of it. I have explained fractions and hierarchical linear modeling, and I want to be honest with you: the fractions crowd asked better questions.

I'm not leaving work. I'm still in data science and research. I still get up in the morning and go looking for what's true. I'm just done doing it inside a system that keeps rearranging the furniture and calling it a renovation.

Education was good to me

Let's start there, because I don't want to be one of those guys.

Education fed my family. It paid for the house, the braces, the car that made a sound I ignored for two years. It sent me to Michigan, Grand Rapids, Ypsilanti, Lansing, California, Florida, Utah, Arizona, North Carolina, Tennessee, and many more. It gave me

Intern

a $47 million grant to write and the audacity to think I could write it. It gave me colleagues I'd take a bullet for and a couple I'd take a bullet from, and both of those made me better.

20s

Thirty years. That's not a job. That's a marriage with a pension plan.

So this isn't a breakup letter. It's more like the moment at the end of a very long dinner party when you realize you've been holding your coat for forty-five minutes listening to the same stories.

Hard lesson number one: I could not tell you who the end user was

In a healthy system, you can name the end user without flinching. Ask a hospital. Ask a restaurant. Ask a plumber. Ask an educator preparation program who it serves and watch what happens. It's not a long pause. But it's there.

Teaching

The answer is supposed to be the student. That's the whole premise. Everything downstream, including the curriculum, the assessment architecture, the accreditation cycle, the strategic plan with its four pillars, and the aspirational verb, is supposedly in service of a young person who needs something they don't yet have. But somewhere in there, the end user quietly became the folks behind the curtain in their feelings, the relationships behind closed doors. Then the legislature. Then the enrollment dashboard. Then whoever was mad on social media that week. It became not being able to speak your mind.

I've built the dashboards. I built one that reduced

reporting latency by 40% and enabled leadership to see equity gaps in real time. I was proud of it. I'm still proud of it. And I will tell you plainly: a gap you can see in real time is not the same as a gap anyone intends to close. Sometimes visibility is just a nicer-looking waiting room.

Student Events

Hard lesson number two: the field moves at the speed of politics, not evidence

Education is the only industry I know that can identify a problem in 2009, name it in 2012, pilot it in 2016, publish the findings in 2019, defund it in 2021, and then rediscover it in 2024 under a fresh acronym with a redesigned logo.

Mentoring

I have sat in a meeting about a meeting where the action item was to schedule the next meeting. And I took notes. Willingly. That's the part I want you to sit with.

I once watched two accomplished professionals debate for forty minutes over whether something was Tier 2 or Tier 3, and by minute six I understood that neither answer would reach a child. But we finished the forty minutes. We're professionals.

State of Michigan

None of this is because educators are lazy. I've never met a lazy educator. I've met exhausted ones, defensive ones, uniformed ones, and a few who had emotionally left the building in 2014 and just kept showing up out of habit. But not lazy. The slowness isn't a people problem. It's a physics problem. You cannot move fast when every decision has eleven stakeholders, four funding sources, one election cycle, and a public comment period.

Hard lesson number three: the students changed, and so did I

The students are different. Everybody over forty-five wants me to say worse. They are not worse. Put that down. They are differently situated. They arrived into a world I merely had to grow into. They've had a supercomputer in their pocket since middle school and an unregulated firehose of everything since birth. They are more fluent than I was, more anxious than I was, and considerably less impressed by institutional authority, which, having spent thirty years inside institutional authority, I have to tell you is a defensible position.

But I have also taught students who were fully capable of doing the work yet unable to see its point. And some days I could not argue them out of it. Because some days I couldn't see the point either, and a good educator does not lie well.

And I changed too. That's the part nobody puts in the retirement speech.

The job I signed up for was: know the content, teach the content, care about the kid.

The job I left was: know the content, teach the content, care about the kid, serve as counselor, caseworker, crisis responder, IT help desk, mandated reporter, content creator, brand ambassador, compliance officer, and manual data-entry clerk for four systems that refuse to speak to one another.

Consulting

It isn't enough to be a good educator anymore. It hasn't been for a while. And my fifty-year-old brain has a finite number of tabs, and sometime around 2023 the browser stopped letting me open new ones. I used to have infinite patience. I want to be precise about this: I did not lose my patience. I spent it. Every bit of it went somewhere and did something. But the account is drawn down, and I'd rather tell you that than fake a balance I don't have.

So why data?

Because a regression will tell you the truth and then decline to care whether you like it.

After three decades in a field built on the careful management of feelings, that is the most restful relationship I have ever had with information. A dataset has never emailed me at 11:47 p.m. asking whether the assignment is mandatory or waited until the last minute, or complained because an assignment is too hard. A coefficient has never told me it had a lot going on this semester. Numbers can absolutely lie to you, but they lie

consistently, which means you can catch them. It got to the point where I was done with faculty who find any small thing to talk about instead of focusing on being colleagues.

What I want now is the behind-the-scenes stuff. Not the mission statement. Not the strategic plan. The actual mechanics. Where does the money really go, versus where the budget narrative says it goes? Who actually decides, versus who's on the org chart. Which policies deliver the outcomes they promised, and which just produce paperwork in a nice font? What structures outlive the people who built them, and why? That last one has become the focus of most of my professional life.

Organizations have a stated story and a revealed one. The revealed one is in the data. I have thirty years of watching the stated story from the inside, which, and I say this with the confidence of a man who has nothing left to lose, makes me extraordinarily well-equipped to know where the bodies are buried.

The nameplate

At one institution, my title lived in a small brass slot on the office door. A card slid in. A card slid out. Somebody designed that on purpose. Somebody sat down at a desk and thought: this will change, so let's build it to change. The most honest piece of institutional furniture I ever encountered, and it cost about four dollars.

I chased the name on the door for a long stretch of my career. Assistant and Associate Professor. Department Chair. Consultant. Director. Assistant Dean. Dean. Principal Investigator. Every one of them felt like arrival, and every one of them was a card in a slot.

Meanwhile my family was at home, being the only thing in my life that was not printed on removable cardstock.

Clarity of absence

Here's the thing nobody tells you: clarity does not arrive on schedule.

It does not come out of a leadership retreat. I know, because I've been to the retreats. I facilitated some of the retreats. I have written more than one aspirational verb on multiple flip charts.

Clarity comes the way it always comes: uninvited, badly timed, and completely undeniable. It takes a life event. Something happens, or someone leaves, or a room is quieter than it should be, and suddenly you can see the whole shape of your priorities lit up like a fire exit.

I found my clarity in an absence. And what it showed me was straightforward enough to fit on an index card: I have finite years, finite energy, and a family that has been extraordinarily patient with a man who kept saying After this next thing.

There is no next thing. There was never going to be a next thing. That's the joke. It's a pretty good one.

For the youngsters

You asked. Actually, you didn't, but I'm fifty, and this is my blog.

1. Get good at something the reorg can't dissolve. Departments vanish. Titles get restructured. A skill goes with you. Mine turned out to be data, which I picked up almost by accident and which has since fed me twice.

2. Learn who signs things. The org chart describes hierarchy. Signatures describe power. They are not the same document, and only one of them is public.

3. Say no about six months earlier than feels polite. The extra committee does not come with extra hours. It comes out of your evenings, and your evenings belong to people who love you.

4. Write it down. An institution's memory is roughly eighteen months and conveniently self-flattering. Yours can be longer. Keep receipts, not grudges.

5. Take the vacation. Nobody in the history of American higher education has been posthumously promoted for unused PTO. Nobody's headstone reads HE WAS ALWAYS AVAILABLE.

6. Love the work. Do not marry the employer. The work will love you back. The employer will send a fruit basket.

7. Keep the kid in the frame. When the acronyms pile up, and the meeting is in minute thirty-eight, ask out loud who this reaches. It won't always change the outcome. But asking it out loud in a room full of adults is the single most useful thing I ever learned to do, and it's free.

Last thing

I gave education thirty years, and it gave me a life. That's a fair trade, and I'd sign it again. I'm not leaving angry. I'm not leaving because it beat me. I'm leaving because I finally learned to read my own data, and it said to go home more.

I'll still be around, doing what I do, asking what's true, looking for the structures underneath the story, arguing with numbers that can't hear me. Just from a different chair. One I picked out myself. To everyone still in it: I see you. The work matters even when the system makes it hard to prove. Keep the kid in the frame.

And whatever they put on your door, remember it slides out.

Your name doesn't.

Rajah E. Smart, Ed.D. — thirty years, P-20. Still here, just differently.