Mission, Vision, Curriculum, Politics

After reading this week's readings for class, I began to try to understand (as mentioned in UBD) the connection between a school's mission, vision, curriculum, and the political demands on school systems. UBD discusses how important it is to keep the end in mind and work backwards when constructing curriculum. If the state standards dictate our "final" results , how can a meaningful and useful mission, vision, and curriculum be established?
So, here are my thought about this subject. A mission explains the school's current goals, for the immediate future, whereas a vision is the "big" picture or what the school will be like in the end. A professor I had last semester stated it beautifully: "Mission is the goal to lose weight, while vision is the image of what you will look like after you lose the weight." Curriculum utilizes these goals to map out what is to be taught and what the learning outcomes are. However, the curriculum is not independent from the mission and vision. They all have to work together to improve student learning.
The complicated portion of this is the demands be the government (i.e. passing the state standardized tests). The only way I could make sense of this was to create a scenario. Suppose we take this scenario. A school has in it's mission and vision something about "developing critical thinkers," for example. The curriculum is then created with learning tasks and objectives to aid the students in becoming critical thinkers. Then the state standards and standardized tests also promote students as critical thinkers. This is where it works! But what happens when the mission, vision, and curriculum are not working toward the same goals? Do those schools fall behind since they do not share the same goals, or are the goals unspoken goals?
After thinking about this topic further, I started to imagine the difficulties faced by administrators when trying to motivate the staff toward passing the state tests. This becomes especially difficult when the administrator does not share the same beliefs as the state. I then looked to a book I am reading that explains this process beautifully. In What Great Principals Do Differently by Todd Whitaker, he says "Effective leaders focus on the behaviors that lead to success, not the beliefs that stand in the way of it. Effective principals don't let standardized tests take over the entire school." He then continues to discuss the schools that exceeded the state's expectations on the tests, and how the principals of those schools felt and what they believed. He explains that these principals realized the importance of test results to others and how it, "brought their school greater autonomy to do what they believed was best for students." These principals also understood the "powerful backdrop" provided by the state standards in aligning and improving curriculum. "The state standards forced educators to shift the focus on the real issue of student learning."
Curriculum must be changed to address the the standards given by the state. However, our mission and vision should also be aligned with the curriculum. All of this is connected and all of it has one main goal: to focus on student learning.