For well over a decade there has been something akin to the figurative admonition that thou shall not pass gas in church; an almost national tacit conspiracy to
speak no derogatory truths about America’s public K-12 schools. Until recently, that reluctance
extended to most media, but it is now commonplace for pundits to simply write
off US public K-12 en masse as a
failed effort of another century. Arguably
one result of the failure to have that national conversation is the present broad
assault on public schools with standardized tests, VAM, vouchers, and charters
as metaphorically the war’s drones and missiles.
The
alleged purpose of the K-12 wars has been to “reform” those schools. Curiously, reform is defined as: “…the improvement or
amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc. Reform is generally distinguished from
revolution. The latter means basic or radical change; whereas reform may be no
more than fine tuning, or at most redressing serious wrongs without altering
the fundamentals of the system. Reform seeks to improve the system as it
stands, never to overthrow it wholesale. Radicals on the other hand, seek to
improve the system, but try to overthrow whether it be the government or other
group.”
Oops
Snowballs can turn into avalanches. Someone should have stomped on the
simplistic test and accountability snowball rolled toward public K-12 long
before it became an avalanche of naïve and/or ideologically motivated tactical
thinking; poorly thought out, narrowly conceived, inaccurately formulated, and
in many cases now outrageous test and VAM protocols. Unfortunately that avalanche is almost self-perpetuating,
accelerated by a platoon of reform factions governed more by self-interest and
ideology than national interest.
Would
it not have been much more intelligent, mature, and less damaging to our
children, teachers, and the nation’s future to have just had the conversation
before declaring war? Can that
conversation still be held, heading off the worst of the strategic consequences
of the current knowledge definition, testing, and VAM debacles? How might that conversation unfold in a
rational and strategically perceptive world?
Having the Conversation
Anticipating the need to support argument for such
a conversation, research instincts prevailed and the search was launched; however,
the criteria for “conversation” proved elusive, not so simple at all. Perhaps why having a conversation about
the US “fiscal cliff” has been so spare, or why generating a community
conversation about school modernization with a school board or superintendent
is a non-starter?
Way beyond the scope of this post is fully addressing
that riddle, but some issues pertinent to our school woes strongly surface. Communication breaks down because of
differences in cultures, values, goals, perceptions, and an array of
biases. Even the nomenclature that
evolves around functions becomes a constraint. A short tale illustrates the challenge in education. A few years ago an education professor
authored a rare journal article on management in our K-12 schools. Basically, he simply reinvented many of
last century’s business and managerial concepts issuing from our B-schools, but
wholly rephrased each. School of education
arrogance? Perhaps, but a
competing explanation is that was the only way to communicate with an
educational establishment that has limited cross-discipline history and
awareness.
The rest of this post suggests that schools, in
spite of the bias to see them as a different functional species, are
conceptually just another specific type of organization, subject to all of the
general concepts that make one organizational form perform more effectively
than another. Particular to the
genre, K-12 school organization has not fundamentally changed in a century,
though virtually all successful management around them has, in major ways.
K-12
Systems as Organizations
Pragmatically, the nation’s K-12 public schools,
because they are not private sector entities start mission/decision life with
some large constraints. Perhaps
seen by alleged reformers as a key issue, they are not accorded the
institutional freedom to parallel private entrepreneurial paths. They are publicly funded. They don’t appear to the casual viewer
to be subject to market influences, not wholly valid. They are frequently overseen by boards with far less
comparative expertise for the genre than private sector firms, and usually
chosen outside of school control (though such influence is frequently attempted
with less than admirable intentions).
They can’t necessarily select to whom they will offer their outputs,
though many currently try to avoid assessment penalties by related fraud. They are not free to hire the best and
brightest, and the sourcing of their “production professionals” is constrained
as well as potentially warped by present education school mediocrity, union
rules, and states’ political and bureaucratic values. And increasingly destructive over the last decades, they are
lassoed, capacity for creative change neutered, with unfunded mandates; a
number in Ohio – cited in a recent conversation with an elected Ohio school board
member – now tallying allegedly over 75 per school system.
Small wonder school administrators start to erect
barriers to transparency, to inputs from external sources, to in any fashion
changing their infrastructure; coping is daunting enough. Coincidentally, few of those
administrators, because of root managerial training unless occurring outside of
the education community, could effectively manage a contemporary business. The “catch 22” of K-12 reform that our
aggressive reformers have simply ignored, substituting attempted forcing of
change by attacking the nation’s teachers under the guise of
“accountability.” Tragically, this
alleged “business-like” strategy is not at all business-like as management is
conceived in the 21st century.
Real accountability starts at the top where organizational design and
process originate.
Bottom line, even with the constraints above
acknowledged, and education biases notwithstanding, our K-12 schools are still organizations,
and subject to the same general principles that govern all formal organization. Public education’s categorical failures,
to heed the lessons of other private and public sector entities that have
re-conceptualized how work gets executed with greater effect, have arguably
precipitated the present warfare.
Almost 75 years ago, Albert Einstein said: “To raise new questions, new possibilities,
to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and
marks real advance in science.” Can you straddle the concept of an entire national K-12 system built
around the same protocols lapsing into obsolescence by lethargy and dogmatism,
and honestly point to US public education arguing the above anthem has been its
overarching goal over the last few decades? Circle the wagons, up with the drawbridge, grab the levies
and run, canonize sports, and demonize any detractor, come much closer as systemic
character assessment. And the real
tragedy, rarely articulated out loud, these folks are responsible for launching
the education of America’s youth – too frequently, they have not been able to secure
their own intellectual currency, with student
learning deficits the sequela.
If the present reform movement is potentially
structurally destructive (for example, just in, Indiana’s legislative downgrading of
requirements for K-12 teachers), and too much of public K-12 is still intellectually
self-destructive or managerially inept, how can you reform the beast? Present testing is one option, but carrying
the present course of that testing logically through not-ready-for-prime-time VAM, to reductio ad absurdum – every
element of K-12 learning is simplistically test-based and short term memory – courts
strategic disaster. The other possibility
is, genuinely revise and reactivate public K-12; and that starts with
rethinking both organization and functions, as well as its rubrics and what we know as knowledge dynamically changing versus don't know.
Real
Corporate Reform
The contention is that a more rational and
productive approach to achieving the legitimate goals of NCLB, responding to “A
Nation at Risk,” is true structural and managerial reform of present public
schools. It will make
enemies. It will scare millions of
teachers asked to both create and manage their own learning spaces and be
accountable for learning performance. It will produce howls of protest by those
who have used K-12 positions and boards to acquire power and stroke egos, or
insulate themselves from accountability and even visibility. It might even cause America’s schools
of education to quit bottom feeding and lift off the bottom of the pond. The argument is that format is far
preferable to the just noticeable tactical success, but strategic failure built
into present reform/testing modes, because the opportunity costs of present
reform tactics are levels of magnitude beyond the corporate profits and Federal
dollars of present action. Present
reform is institutionalizing substitution of low order thinking skills (LOTS)
for high order thinking skills (HOTS), not the path for a society that must
reassert intellectual leadership in a global society that is definitely not
your grandfather’s world.
What would real corporate reform of public K-12 entail? Not surprisingly, the US isn’t short of prototypes. Most if not all of
the highest growth and technologically sophisticated companies in the nation
feature managerial concepts applicable here. The building blocks consist
of, as implied, at core some contemporary form of organization. From
there the list includes most concepts already out there and being continually
revised: Support creativity; a research mindset; design excellence; sensitive
recognition of stakeholders; conscious product positioning; modeling of productivity and
cost effectiveness approaches; contemporary understanding of employee recruitment
and motivation; continuous human resource development; leadership styles matching need; quality assurance via process control; leadership that now goes beyond "command and
control;" and embedding continuous planning, product refinement and
assessment into the basic fabric of an organization, in this case all the way
to the classroom. Every K-12 function has an image that can be expressed in business/managerial
and behavioral terms to drive pursuit of excellence.
Any contemporary K-12 school also needs to be at the cutting edge of
digital technology, Internet use, incorporating online or self-directed
learning, embracing and employing social networking as potential for learning
rather than banning or fumbling it. One disgusting example from a local
school system was its being gifted one gigabit Internet capacity – then used to
videoconference area pro forma teachers'
meetings. A benchmark, 20 years ago, a southern Indiana high school (with
fiber) was via videoconferencing holding real-time joint classes in French
here, and in English in a comparable school in France.
The automatic contempt for many current
retro public K-12 systems seemingly living in bubbles is explicable; letting
that contempt drive US K-12 into a last century learning mode based on naïve
testing and teacher intimidation, and not differentiating public schools that
are succeeding in creating HOTS versus their opposites, are not explicable.
A Rip In Our Social Fabric Larger Than Tactics
Reflecting on the present status of “reform not,” it’s as
if an ideologically driven and delusional part of this nation, seeing it and all of its
works zero-sum games, can’t tolerate one of the two most successful social
experiments of its history.
Present alleged reform on one side seems intent on purging public K-12 seen as "socialistic," and learning with its teachers unless they can be assessed in a pedestrian conception of cause and effect, or a monthly P & L statement. The other side, equally autocratic
and dogmatic, is pressing a utopian belief with hypocrisy and multiplying the first effect. Both, seemingly unthinkingly, may
strategically hamstring future US K-12 education rather than improve it. Dr. Diane Ravitch, who originally helped fashion NCLB, now an opponent of both NCLB and its testing obsessions, in her first book -- whether for effect or
feeling the oppressiveness of current reform -- stated she felt “…like she was
living in a period of national insanity.”
Winston Churchill, in responding to a constituent’s verbal barb, once said:
“Madame, you may very well be
right.”
The current K-12 reform movement is long on self-righteous chutzpah and simplistic ideology, inching toward oppression, and
critically short on wisdom. That
is why present allegedly “corporate reform” is pure fraud, and potentially a
strategic disaster for this nation.
Next
No comments:
Post a Comment