"...Leaders must remove barriers to change."

As the credits ran and tears streamed down my face, the filmmakers left me with this thought "... leaders must remove barriers to change".  Late this afternoon I decided to go see "Waiting for Superman".  I knew that it would be heartbreaking and that I was likely to leave in a fairly foul mood, but I knew that it was a film I had to see.

We've been talking about and reading a lot on change and as leaders I believe that it is up to us to be change agents.  What I witnessed in the film was how resistant other stakeholders can be to change even when it is blatantly obvious that change is desperately needed.  To be sure behavior change is never easy, and isn't education reform one of the greatest societal behavior changes of all time? But to sit idly by and continue to operate with the status quo is to rob our nations students of a quality education that will prepare them to be the leaders of tomorrow.

It seems to me that many people are, at least philosophically, supportive of changes in education, but when it comes to the hard work of making change happen the masses seem to fade to the back.  In the reading by Tim O'Reilly he stated that "[paradigm shifts] are often hard fought, and the ideas underlying them not widely accepted until long after they were first introduced.  What's more, they often have implications that go far beyond the insights of their creators."  I found this statement to be ironically accurate and equally frightening as it seems we move further and further away from true education reform.