We Must Be Willing to Do What's Unpleasant in the Short Term
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that effective education leadership requires the courage to make unpopular decisions that serve students' long-term interests.
Key Takeaways
- Short-term discomfort, long-term benefit - Holding high standards, enforcing consequences, and making tough calls are uncomfortable but necessary
- Avoiding discomfort harms students - Choosing the easy path — lower standards, fewer consequences — feels kinder but produces worse outcomes
- Leadership means doing the hard thing - The willingness to make unpopular decisions for the right reasons is what separates effective leaders from ineffective ones
Transcript
The unpleasant stuff makes the Thank you for watching.
It is unpleasant to expel a student for assaulting a teacher, but it's better than not having teachers because they all quit because they were being assaulted.
There are all these things that are unpleasant in the short term that we have to be willing to do, especially as educational leaders.
We have to be willing to do something that is in everybody's best interest, even if it is unpleasant in the short term.
And I think we have to not see that as a betrayal of our commitment to the individual student, right?
Right.
We have to see the individual student as existing within a community.
Right.
A community that they are a part of.
And some of the things that that student does when they are in that community need to result in them being removed from that community, at least temporarily.
Right.
There are certain things that we can do to burn bridges in our lives.
And I think that's an important lesson that we need to teach all of our students, whether they're more on the perpetrator side, whether they're more on the victim side or the bystander side.
People need to understand, teachers need to see and have this reinforced.
They know it, but they need to see this principle in operation that there are consequences to one's actions and there are boundaries around acceptable behavior.
I think so many of the problems we're seeing in education today come from a desire to eliminate those boundaries and eliminate the negative consequences for students that come from their own choices.
But those boundaries are there for a reason and those consequences are short-term and in place for a reason.
And if we try to take them away, it's the long-term benefit and it's the collective benefit that suffers, right?
People pay a price collectively and the individual pays a price for not getting the lesson that they need to, for getting the impact that they need to from something that may be unpleasant in the short term.
So I don't think failing a class is the end of the world.
I think lots of people fail a class or fail a quarter and end up being very successful in life.
But I do think we are failing our students when we give them passing grades when they haven't done the work to pass a class.
I do think we are hurting everybody when we don't have consequences for behavior.
And I just think that's a basic element of maturity, that kind of long-term perspective on how we help young people and how we run safe and effective schools.
Let me know what you think.