One of my school board friends, yes I do have friends who are school board members, told me this past week about a parent who called him because their child would not be graduating on Saturday.

They suggested that they were unaware of the lack of progress that their child had made in school. One needs to remember that this state, now 35th in the nation in graduation rates, has a very minimal set of requirements, and this child couldn’t meet them!

I suggested that our school systems don’t have a “Dead-man’s switch.” For those of you who are unaware of this term a little history might be in order. Railroads and trolley companies found that they were experiencing operators who either had medical problems, or fell asleep, and this resulted in some serious disasters. To reduce these “Train wrecks” switches were, and are, installed on all trains that require frequent responses from the operator to be sure that they are awake and are not suffering some kind of incapacitating event.

Many years ago I had the opportunity to travel on a Turbo-liner where you could sit behind the engineer, there was a glass screen, and see exactly what the engineer was doing. Every so often there was a chime that went off and the engineer was required to acknowledge this by pressing a button to cancel the chime, a “Dead-man’s switch.” If the engineer fails to respond, the process of stopping the train takes place automatically. More recently if the train passes a stop signal this shutdown also takes place.

It is well to note when a train wreck occurs the first fatality is usually the engineer and this is a protection for the engineer, others on the train, and those in the vicinity of the tracks.

Why isn’t this the case in education? One could suggest that schools are just like a railroad in that they build the “tracks” for the train and should also provide the signaling. Our children could be considered the engineer and parents and taxpayers are either on the train or beside the tracks where they can also be damaged by engineers who are not operating in a safe manner.

In this state, if we were running like a railroad, we could assure the passengers that they have a 70% chance of arriving at their intended destination. Locally, our “local train” only has about a 50% chance of arriving without a wreck. What a way to “Run a Railroad!”

It must be that we don’t have any “Dead-man’s switches!” Remember that “Dead-man’s switches” require a response from the engineer or the train comes to a halt! It seems that in the case of education the warning chime (report card) is often sounded, but there is no response and the train keeps going! This leads to a level of “train wrecks” that would be totally unacceptable in any other part of the business world, or in much of government!

Would my friend, the school board member, be getting a call about a train wreck if there had been a “Dead-man’s switch?” I don’t think so.

When, on a train, the switch is activated, the train comes to a quick halt and some form of remediation begins. If the engineer has a medical condition, appropriate measures are taken. If the engineer has fallen asleep on the job, he may be looking for another source of employment. In short the train does not move until the matter is corrected.

Why isn’t this the case on the education railroad? If we thought that these trains were only getting to destination 50% of the time, wouldn’t we want to fix this? You would think so. Would we be running so many trains that are ending in wrecks? You wouldn’t think so.

What is the problem? I would suggest that we are not willing to insist on a response from the engineer, or the sponsor of the engineer (parents), before we restart the train! How much longer can we run such a railroad? There are a lot of abandoned rail lines, isn’t this also the case for some “abandoned” trains on the “Education Line?”