Zombies have been hits
in this season’s digital games, so it seemed fitting to address so-called
corporate K-12 reform for pretty much what it is.
Multiple Culprits, One
Villain, A Cast of Fools
Make no mistake, the
roster of culprits for the present road to a US learning cliff goes well
beyond a segment of the business community that is almost delusional. It
includes: States slavishly doing the pseudo-reform dirty work; America’s parents who have yet, except in a few states, to wake
up enough to express outrage at the standardized test avalanche; our President
and the US Department of Education appearing clueless, irrationally committed
to a utopian vision of education, or politically driven; and obviously many
public schools so in denial or delusional the mythology of "breaking dawn" seems non-fiction.
Factor in some of our
corporate entities who are anything but clueless, indeed quite accomplished,
but better depicted as corporate vultures; the handful of firms
aggressively lobbying every government level, dominating the textbook, test
construction, and scoring businesses, now costing the nation's public schools over $1.7B annually in direct test costs, with unknown but major opportunity costs. Inferentially, those firms employ some of
our best and brightest, but have studiously traded profits and market control for any sense of
national educational responsibility, and ironically, true accountability, the
reform movement’s eponymous anthem.
The giant rotten spot in
the corporate reform apple for our teachers has been simply ignored in a nation
bouncing from one miscue to the next. States like Ohio have fashioned seemingly logical rubrics for school grading, but all wrapped around the assumed validity and reliability of standardized tests; early digital folk wisdom applies -- "garbage in, garbage out."
But the core issue is, no self-respecting corporate executive advocating excellence, no business theorist, no organizational theorist, no real educational scholar, and no contemporary public administration advocate would hang out their shingle based on the strategic and tactical malpractice being advocated as “corporate reform.”
But the core issue is, no self-respecting corporate executive advocating excellence, no business theorist, no organizational theorist, no real educational scholar, and no contemporary public administration advocate would hang out their shingle based on the strategic and tactical malpractice being advocated as “corporate reform.”
Testing As Strategy?
In today’s knowledge environment ensuring absolute equality of US education is daunting,
encompassing over 49MM K-12 public school students. It is utopian.
Pragmatically, it may parallel the feasibility of zero unemployment, those
measures recognizing that 100 percent employment is unattainable in a real
world. Pushing any one button or assessment venue that can even nudge
that K-12 mass is docking a supertanker with a bass boat. But present
unthinking standardized testing and VAM – whether a barely disguised vendetta
against public education for allegedly growing Democrats, or gaming public systems to allege failing public K-12 schools, driving privatization – have actually
accomplished the unthinkable, it has that tanker on a course to destroy the
refinery.
Assessment is a
necessary strategy in managing any process, including learning, but reflects complex design; testing is a
tactic that ranges from unobtrusive measures to examination that foots highly
skilled professions. Formative testing in K-12, now a fancy term, has
been around since teaching, and left in the hands of teachers is a flexible and
vital tool for gauging learning progress.
The question is, can you
test your way to creating utility and value employing the present standardized
testing logic and models?
Challenging that
argument, the elements of K-12 learning encompass: Subject matter that is
comprehensive set against “knowing what we know as well as what we don’t know,”
quality controlled for accuracy; students partitioned to reflect comparable
states for absorbing and integrating knowledge, including the levels of prior
learning; a medium that manages the process of discovery and assimilation,
teachers to online instruction to self-designated paths; the core of real
learning, blending memory of micro-knowledge and constructivism to create
neural nets serving critical thought and problem solving; methods to assess
attainment that persists; and not to be underrated for significance, a social-organizational
setting that enables and motivates the process but also stimulates creativity
that bypasses programmatic learning. As it turns out, the latter process
may weigh in as equal, or more important than all before.
Envision bypassing most
of the above in favor of narrowly, mechanically, repetitively testing for
marginally assimilated assorted micro-components of knowledge. How many trials, how
many tests would it take to intuitively arrange a couple of truckloads of parts
into a supercomputer without a comprehensive design; how many replications of
process blocks and connections would it take to create an optimal organization
by only testing its subsequent capacities to deliver selected functions? Even if a
product accidentally results, the process may occur unpredictably or too late
or never, and carry with it participant repulsion from the process.
Present standardized testing and VAM, riddled with design, validity and measurement
error, offering no learning as an outcome of the intrinsic process, pushed as
strategies to improve K-12 learning is education reform’s “emperor parading with no
clothes.”
Orthodoxy, Modernity,
and Creativity
Three overarching issues
challenge US education: Accountability in K-12 organization, and of course it is a
given that must be present but is part a political battle, part the
function of intelligent organization design; knowing what we know; and where does this position
America’s greatest need, to field human resources who can become a major source of the world’s innovation,
driven by creativity. The third issue far and away carries more
strategic portent.
Intelligent public K-12
reform could have been launched more productively with multiple ways and means
than by the testing/VAM bulldozer. Cutting to the chase, an hypothesis,
it was because that might have featured preservation of public education –
waking up public K-12’s bureaucracies, it failed the ideological delusions of
an extreme right wing, and it would have blunted the profit opportunities for a
cabal of corporations. But in choosing the testing route, this reform
bandwagon elected the least managerially competent and most potentially
damaging path it could have taken, reflecting the 100 year old performance
model emanating from the origins of manufacturing, “…do things with perfect
replicability, at ever increasing scale, and steadily increasing
efficiency.” Your grandfather’s America.
A few years ago
management guru and author Gary Hamel and McKinsey partner Lowell Bryan were
interviewed about the role of creativity in a future America. With
profound apologies to both for paraphrasing their words to avoid the naïve
charge that management excellence applies only to companies:
“There are three reasons the technology of
[organizations] may well change radically over the first few decades of this
century as it did during the adolescence of the last one. The
availability of powerful new tools for coordinating human effort will
profoundly change the work of [organizations]. Then we have a new set of
challenges: The increasing demand for [organizations] to be adaptable,
innovative, and exciting places to work. A third force for change is a
revolution in expectations. Take a look at our kids – the first
generation that has grown up on the Web. Their basic assumption is that
your contribution should be judged simply on the merits of what you do rather
than on the basis of your title or your credentials or providence or anything
else.”
There is no element of
present reform dogma that embraces that needed creativity, nor that shouldn’t
be labeled “zombie” reform. Present method is neither
excellent management, nor even credible accountability because of gross
fundamental sensing errors in resultant data to drive the present view of
accountability. On top of the mixed to unethical motivation of the national odd-couple of K-12 reform, America’s next generation of youth are (also) being
set-up to plow the furrow of another century rather than invent a future.
How Did We Get Here?
In hindsight the
question is rhetorical if one unflinchingly looks at the last half century of
public K-12 education:
Exponential expansion of science and social
science knowledge, accompanied by an unprecedented social delivery system in the
Internet, literally denied or deflected by most of public K-12.
Public K-12 systems complacent and dogmatic, from the "buyer's" perspective frequently a
geographic monopoly, unless a parent is willing to expend annually
collegiate-level dollars on private schools.
That same public K-12, increasingly unaccountable
to even its public because of state and school oversight ineptitude,
accompanied by school administration rarely properly trained or vetted, creating
marginally controlled fiefdoms.
Increasing levels of poverty and cultural
deprivation as the US middle class has been compressed, income disparity
fostered by right-wing ideologies, coupled with only superficially abated
racism and bigotry.
The bizarre specter of NCLB continued, morphing
into RttT, and a reasonably intelligent White House getting into bed with the
most reactionary political extremes and a cabal of corporate vultures. This
beggars the imagination, perhaps the only hypothesis being that a liberal
President refused to address the real issue because of fear of loss of
teacher/parent/union votes from that confrontation; leaving public K-12 to do the highly unlikely, reform
itself?
Lastly, but egregious for a nation that exudes
education as a key virtue, is the virtual intellectual decay of its collegiate
schools of education with nary a whimper by our university communities or any
other stakeholder.
Escape?
Our public K-12 systems
remain a massive muddle, that won’t be assuaged even if they are tested until
they drop. Half of our public K-12 systems in America's "bubbles" will still be in denial and/or
obsolete, hands out for the next levy, as they are carted off the
battlefield. At least a generation of Americans is going to be shoved
into a world intellectual meat grinder until some sense prevails. But
perhaps the largest risk is to this nation’s core economy. There are just
below the surface of applicability pools of development from over a half
century of research and science. Without a generation of human resources
that can grasp not just unrelated facts, but increasingly complex connections
both technical and social, and get beyond orthodoxy via creativity to exploit
that potential, the US is in great jeopardy.
Escape? How fit
extremes of two political parties, a squad of billionaire self-styled
education experts, a platoon of educational demagogues rotating on talk shows
and building contributions, a material part of the public education bureaucracy
in denial or delusional, one President, and Arne Duncan, onto one mental health
professional’s couch? While that puzzle is stressing neural nets, there
is a partial solution -- retrieve the testing from the private sector's de facto election of what is needed knowledge: Put the
creation of knowledge standards and assessment technology back into the hands
of the stewards of knowledge, and its assessment back in the venue of education's teaching pros. One example simply but powerfully makes the
case – the AAAS and its Project 2061 – look and learn.
As you view Project
2061, reflect: The products of that project were funded with a diminutive $1.6 million from the US Department of Education (the latest Powerball pot was $588 million), that has under Duncan expended over $4 billion to produce its “race to the bottom, er, top,” based on bureaucratic punch lists and
tests. The reform mantra, endlessly repeated has been, make public schools legitimately more
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