​I’ve been a Lakers fan since about 1996. I was 9 years old, Shaquille O’Neal had just been traded from Orlando, and Kobe Bryant was their big draft pick. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Kobe is about to retire after 20 years in the league, and the entire season has been one big montage to his career. Last night the Lakers Instagram account showed a photo of Kobe entering the arena with the caption, “Two more stories to tell #KB20.” Bryant had two games left. Two more opportunities to tell his story. Two more opportunities to live his legacy. Now as you’re reading this, of course, he’s got one night. One last chance to leave his mark on a league that he’s been a part of for more than half his life.
 
You don’t have to be a Kobe Bryant fan, and you don’t have to be a fan of how the Lakers have let the season play out, but it got me thinking. Are we taking every day that we enter the classroom as another opportunities to tell another story? Are you telling your story each and every day? Writing another page of your legacy? How are you showing and sharing those stories? We live in a connected world where you get to tell your story – your story, your classroom’s story, your students’ stories – on your own terms every single day. Make sure you don’t let the opportunity pass you by.
 
Each night game of Bryant’s farewell tour has highlighted his past, his accomplishments, his undeniable skills. Are you giving students an opportunity to tell a story each time they walk in the room? Each day they spend in your class is like Bryant’s farewell tour. Those kids won’t be back next year, they’ll be moving on to the next chapters in their lives. Each first is also a last. It might be a repeat experience for you, but the kids in those seats will never again experience 2nd grade. They won’t take 9th grade US History again (we hope). Each day you get to set the stage for them to live their legacy.
 
And when it comes right down to it, this is even more relevant at the end of the year. As April fades to May and graduation caps and gowns emerge (whether it’s Kindergarten graduation, high school graduation, or college), we have a choice to make. We can give our students a chance to go out like champions – pushing them to be their best every single day that we have left with them, or we can let them slide on the back end. Kobe is still putting up 35 points a night – every game matters, there are stories yet to be written. 

We talk a lot about doing what's "best for kids." Why else would one become an educator? I have yet to meet a child who says, "Wow, when I grow up I really want to find a job where I can attend weekly staff meetings that could have been an email..." But you DO meet a lot of kids who want to teach when they grow up because they had somebody powerful in their education experience that made them feel like the most important, valued person in the room. With that in mind, I really do believe that educators enter to profession to make a difference - to do what's best for kids. 

However, all too often we see decisions being made not based on what's best for kids, but based on finances, based on politics, based on compliance. These are pretty dangerous realities. 

We want to do what's best for kids, but we have to do it within the structure of allowable growth, tax allowances, and formula mandates - that sounds like a child-centered environment, doesn't it? 

We want to do what's best for kids, but we have to navigate the politics of it all. We navigate the majority party at the state level, we navigate school boards and administrators. We're even navigating the national political stage, as getting rid of the Department of Education has become a focal point of our presidential candidates (to be fair, this isn't a new concept, but it's certainly being touted a lot louder than I typically remember). I'm perfectly capable of accepting the fact that people have very different ideas of what is best for kids, but when is the last time you even heard kids mentioned in this circus, let alone what's best for them?

We want to do what's best for kids, as long as we don't stray too far from the status quo. Compliance is a key ingredient in innovation, right? We want more powerful and better and different and innovative, but we don't want to have to change the way we do things? We want kids' math and reading scores to go up, so we add more 'minutes' to their day, but we add more of the same. If the status quo was working, we wouldn't need to be adding more minutes, right? We have an opportunity to be truly innovative, but continue to choose more of same. 

We want to do what's best for kids, but at some point along the way too many people forget about that 1st grader who wanted to grow up to be a teacher because he wanted to make a difference; because somebody made him feel like he was on top of the world and he wanted to share that feeling with others. 

I get it. We can't just wave a magic wand and get rid of politics and budgets and regulations and tradition, but what we CAN do is take a step back and ask ourselves if what we're doing is REALLY what's best for kids. In George Couros's book The Innovator's Mindset he talks about innovating inside the box. There will always be constraints, but it's not impossible work within them to achieve amazing results, just by asking ourselves one question at the start of each day - at the start of each legislative session - at the start of each board meeting - Is this best for kids? If each of us pledged to truly keep this in mind as we made decisions, from the classroom to the boardroom to the floor of the House and Senate, what kind of difference could we make? We have to pay more than just lip service to "what's best for kids" because as it says on the bracelet given to me by rockstar educator Adam Welcome, #KidsDeserveIt.