A Different Perspective
The vessel traversed our solar system
at a modest but unimagined fraction of the speed of light, encountering only but
protected from solar radiation and variations in magnetic flux at its boundary,
propulsion technology those on the barely visible blue planet may discover in
the 22nd century, if climate change has not regressed present
societies and even civilization.
The vessel’s occupants, whatever they are, have been in space for
centuries, periodically reconstituted, or remanufactured, or if biologic carbon-based versus synthetic, cloned,
or just in control of the telomeres that regulate cell apoptosis.
This was the second proximate visit to the vicinity of the planet in one
of its centuries.
In the planet earth’s
calendar time, the first visit was 1920, where intelligence in the same vessel
had visited earth, though not in the naïve sense of hokey anthropomorphic images
of tiny bodies, with big heads and oversized eyes. Rather by virtue of quantum mechanics and a far more complex
version of what we have labeled a hologram, an image of a human with apparent substance
is placed on earth, able to roam freely and change locations virtually at the
speed of light, and be invisible when required (an effect now being achieved by
US scientists in a primitive fashion by bending light). The science in this case was capable of
projecting reality but also sensing and forwarding all information back to its
creators for a brief period before distance defeated the technology.
As the photons and
related information are absorbed by that alien intelligence the changes on one
of our planet’s continents between 1920 and 2010 are noted with at least
curiosity: From the 1920’s still primitive
but raucous society, emergence of massive physical transport technologies; societal-,
power-, and hate-driven conflicts using larger and less discriminating weapons that had devastated nations and millions of
the species; cynical or unthinking destruction of myriad non-human species; discovery
of nuclear reactions and the questionable controllability and yin and yang of
that capability; the cleverness to send a human to its moon, a “Voyager” to the
edge of deep space, and sophisticated mechanical crawlers as explorers to a planet they call
Mars, but also leaving 19,000 pieces of space junk greater than 5 cm in earth
orbit.
The mining algorithm
continued to register change: Discovery
and primitive manipulation of organic DNA by relative brute force; emergence of
silicon-based computing capability that appears to double every 18 months or
so; explosion of ubiquitous and chaotic electronic-based communication
capacities that appear to have abandoned historical morality and totally warped
many societies’ cognitive and emotional expression, propagandizing or dumbing-down
large segments of societies’ mature residents; growth of cost-effective
robotics and AI eliminating human jobs at an accelerated pace; and the hint of
discovery of the practical implications of elemental particles, and even the
promise of a range of quantum effects and computing, that along with eventually
using atoms and even one’s DNA as the basis for all computing, would irrevocably
change societal interactions and cognitive events.
And sensing quickly picked
up the material change in the parts per million of CO2 and even more
problematic methane in the earth’s atmosphere, plus the change in temperatures
of that protective blanket, the temperatures and acidity of its oceans, and
with computing capability that makes earth climate change modeling appear analogous
to code in a hand-held 1960’s calculator, noted the major ablation of ice at
its poles and increasing short term severe weather aberrations produced by all
related accumulative changes.
As data mining proceeded,
comparing 1920’s records to 2010, a tiny concomitant event was revealed, a
piece of man-made earth infrastructure and anthropology that seemed amazingly consistent,
but in a microsecond was logged as the negative social constraint it is; except
for some materials science changes, and some superficiality earth’s natives
called architecture or style, the assemblies of beings and organizations were
instantly recognizable between the first and second visits. The data mining and anthropological
cataloguing algorithms registered momentarily what might have passed on earth
as alarm bells. For those
assemblies, dubbed public schools, had aggressively sequestered the earth’s
young – reading between lines and the genre’s body language, the anthropology
algorithm projected their stewards, dubbed educators, were change resistant,
captives of tradition, and paranoid about publicly revealing what they were dispensing
as knowledge in those places, and how, tying self-worth to some perceived
entitlement rather than performance – but were apparently failing in creating the
society’s needed learning.
Straight and Brief
Long but revealing way around to
the key point, but many presentations in the last few years have already
asserted that a reanimated 1920’s American would recognize little of 2013’s skylines
and invention, from Google Glasses, to a space shuttle, to a Large Hadron
Collider, to the number of women in positions of power, but its K-12 public
schools would be immediately familiar.
The obvious implication is that those schools, their sociology, and
their methods may represent an obsolete organizational model for the entrusted
mission.
Some may take
offense at the notion that K-12 classroom performance assessment is needed, but
that monolithic reasoning is precisely the argument being unanimously used to
justify the present corporate reform tactics, standardized testing in extremis, simplistic VAM assessments, and the
ubiquitous use of “accountability” applied specifically to teachers.
Paralleling the
accountability argument, but at a different pole, our public K-12 schools
overall have wimped out in their own defense, while simultaneously failing
miserably to offer an alternative model of K-12 performance that annunciates
and justifies high order or long term learning versus the present test-induced
effects.
Lastly, the present
reform version of teacher accountability is analogous to holding an auto assembly
technician accountable for a string of vehicle defects produced by one of its
robots because a plant manager accepted a flawed assembly model and
software. Public K-12
accountability, as articulated by every knowledgeable management tome, starts
with leadership, in this case from a superintendent and principals – it will be
argued that presently many are closer to being deployed as, respectively, K-12
“plant managers” and “foremen” rather than needed learning strategists.
Organization Redux
The above, still
just a fraction of the factors impacting current school performance, all lead
to the organizational design(s) that foots present K-12 performance issues. The next few posts will explore the
nature of organization designs applicable to US K-12 public schools, or even
privatized K-12 programs. The
for-profit motive prompting charters intersects organizational design, but not
to the extent that many believe if the mission of an educational system is
properly specified.
In turn, the
organizational boxes designated superintendent and principal aren’t even in the
mix until the right organizational processes and structure are matched to the
mission of a K-12 system. The key
point is, that an organizational design is not merely the usual graphic of
boxes connected by solid or dotted lines, or what is termed a table of
organization, but the arrangement of various processes that connect and bind
human resources in designated roles, along with a gestalt that is the resultant of creating an organization. In the latter sense, the organization
becomes a system that can learn, function in ways that may not have been
intended by a designer, and survive its designers and operators. The present K-12 school models may, age
aside, actually still be optimal for needed future learning; they may also be
hopelessly obsolete. If the
latter, beating on public K-12 schools with corporate reform, testing, and VAM,
may result in less performance than having left them alone.
The Managers
Before leaving the
alleged peak coordinators of a school model, some positioning.
Our public schools
did not spring into existence with superintendents and principals, but with,
first, school administration by local committees, then by state lay boards, finally
by local lay boards, a product of the oversight of education in the US
Constitution. The first local
superintendents were created in a few cities by 1837, in more by 1870, reaching
a high water mark in 1960 when there were more than 35,000 superintendents. Nor was superintendent existence and
positioning prescribed by statue, but only by convention.
The challenge in
assessing this leadership form for K-12 by five authors writing on
superintendency in this century was synthesized as:
“The superintendent of schools is a position of wide influence but one
that is narrowly understood. This, in part, stems from its history. Rarely has
a position of such centrality grown in such a tangled way. Consequently, there
has not been much written or studied about the superintendency, and to this
day, not much is known about how it functions and why some people do it well
and others do not. Further, because of the tremendous pressure on public
education in the twenty-first century, the superintendent's role is changing
and moving toward an uncertain future.”
A reasonable
proposition given the last decades’ marginal performance of US collegiate
schools of education, and their isolation from other disciplines, is that few
superintendents and principals educated in only that venue came out with the
interdisciplinary and managerial awareness for school organization and
leadership presently demanded.
They may even have been exceptional classroom teachers, but in the same
spirit as observed in higher education, that classroom
excellence may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for organization
leadership; some of the best collegiate professors regularly become the least
effective deans.
One perspective on
the future of that public K-12 leadership by the same authors as above is
likely pretty close to the challenge:
“…the uncertain political climate that now surrounds schools will
require the superintendent to be proficient in politics and the art of
persuasion. Much of the work will revolve around the ability to create and
maintain relationships. The modern superintendent will not be a superintendent
of schools whose job is to oversee and manage – he or she will be a
superintendent of learning who will have to navigate an uncertain terrain with
skill and finesse.”
A last glaring managerial inconsistency, with
systems populated by weak or sycophant school boards, public school
superintendents may effectively report to no one; explicably Lord Acton's "dictum" may kick in. Conversely, there are enough anecdotes about K-12 school
peak leadership that has been highly ethical and successful to suggest there are criteria
to be identified. Unfortunately,
the reform movement has been so intent on using billions of dollars and
questionable research to attack the classroom teacher that there has been
little empirical research to guide selection of best public K-12 normative
leadership models.
Designing the Organization
This is the beginning of a journey. It starts with the premise that
US public K-12 education left the blinds down for most of a century, assuming
that K-12 education and schools were unique, not subject to more general
theories of human behavior and structural change to achieve their work.
A K-12 school system is in the abstract
simply de facto an organization, that
was either designed with awareness of the criteria for its strategic and
tactical organizational performance, or just evolved by successive functions
and feedbacks. It is an
organization (existing within some specific environment that may or not be
fully recognized and assessed) that usually starts with a mission – though many
public K-12 schools have only belatedly discovered the need for that definition
– then refined by specification of more complex values and goals, and takes on
operational character by roles and how human resources are engaged.
Management futurist and author Gary Hamel
in his 2007 book, The Future of Management, highlighted our future
challenges. Paraphrasing his
observations for education:
“…your [organization] will be challenged to change in a
way for which it has no precedent. What’s even more worrisome, he argues,
is that decades of orthodox management decision-making practices,
organizational designs, and approaches to employee relations provide no real
hope that [organizations] will be able to avoid faltering and suffering painful
restructurings.
I’ve often felt as if I were trying to teach a dog to
walk on his hind legs. Sure, if you get the right people in the room, create
the right incentives, and eliminate the distractions, you can spur a lot of
innovation. But the moment you turn your back, the dog is on all fours again
because it has quadruped DNA, not biped DNA.
Now there’s a new set of challenges on the horizon. How
do you build organizations that are as nimble as change itself? How do you
mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee, every day? How do you
create organizations that are highly engaging places to work in? And these
challenges simply can’t be met without reinventing our 100-year-old management
model.”
In a related context, New
York Times op-ed writer and author, Tom Friedman this Sunday underscored
the major significance of collaborating in achieving organizational (or
national) performance, a theme that has been repeated for the last couple of
decades by those critiquing American management. For perspective, given the consistency and evidence of highly
successful performance in US sectors that actually practice it, how does the
present K-12 corporate reform movement metaphorically stack up to that goal in
its crude advocacy of last post’s “groups of apes hurling rocks at each other
to see who survives?”
Assumptions Rooting Beliefs
The last part of the
problem statement is the set of core assumptions or beliefs about a formal K-12
learning process that root the entire school venue. A start on those entry conditions includes assessing beliefs:
That
K-12 education must be formal, in groups defined by age, structured by extant disciplines,
successfully guided by generalized rubrics, and delivered by some dyadic or
group interpersonal exchange versus amenable to programmable learning delivery?
That the
“classes or grades” in K-12 are actually meaningful ways of partitioning students
for imparting knowledge and creating learning; addresses the variance of current
performance; reflects awareness of the effect of prior learning, cognitive
readiness, and social efficacy of that mode of segmentation? Where rapidly expanding MOOC (massive
online open courses) fit into any level of K-12?
That traditional
teaching and teachers are actually the relevant or at least universal contexts
for visualizing how learning occurs across highly evolving personal capacities
in child development?
How
learning actually happens, and how it is translated into the capacity to do
work, and create, given the distinctions regularly unfolding between
education’s deductive models of learning, some a century old, versus the cognitive
processes being explained by current and likely future neural biological and
field empirical research?
Whether
there is such a thing as a meaningful “common core” as presently being
marketed, and whether that is hubris and instead of actually conveying
knowledge, has become a form of social and values indoctrination? Is that core a contradiction of genuine
knowledge of phenomena and processes as developed and catalogued by legitimate specialists and scientists in substantive disciplines?
What
happens when benchmarking and contemporary assessments of productivity are
applied against the allocations of resource spending in public K-12 systems?
How do
we actually, with validity and reliability, model how learning occurs
longitudinally, with what mix of causal factors, and how longitudinally does
that tactical learning translate into maturing professional and social practice
by its recipient?
What K-12
management styles, coupled with what environments create durable and high
performance systems, and coupled to what classroom performance styles, produce
the greatest learning change with the least internal variance across learners?
The list probably goes on;
what a growing list suggests is that public K-12 a century ago did not discover
the holy grail of defining the work of learning, and has for a century failed
to do its own critical home work on structural issues of what works, vis propagating
traditional classroom rubrics.
Given that American society seems quite short on holy grails, or even
finding fiscal responsibility measured in 2 or 3 x 10 to the 12th
dollars, the premise is public K-12 design still has a way to go.
Design Factors
While the school
organizational model simply supplies the footers and defines infrastructure for
its functions and interrelationships, it is where subsequent performance
starts.
Presently ignored in the
proposed modeling is a whole universe of attributes of the human players in the
K-12 game. At issue is whether an
organization is designed around individuals and personalities, or whether the
design precedes the actors? Both
scenarios are embedded in the history of education, and especially outside of
education, where there may be a sharper top-down role for personal
leadership/entrepreneurship in the private sector, and there are many successful
examples of the latter. Premised
on the view that the public K-12 system has to survive the entry and exit of
any of its performers over time, yet stay stable, the view for the moment is
that such organization supersedes design based on personalities.
Below are two sets of the
criteria that will be used over the next posts to assess and propose
alternative models for achieving the public K-12 school mission, juxtaposed
against various general models of organization you may have encountered in a
first management course, e.g., centralized/flat, line and staff, matrix, etc. The proposition is, that
triangulating alternative models of organization, criteria sought in design,
and the processes that are enabled or are a design’s bête noire, can be used to assess organizational options to seek a
best fit to the school’s specific environments and raison d'etre.
The first set encompasses generic
criteria sought in any organization’s design. The second set proposes, that more important than
traditional names in organizational boxes, are the processes that any
organization design must support to deliver on its mission.
Possible
organizational criteria are:
Create
learning measurement that goes beyond present standardized tests.
Make the
system a force in shaping its own reform strategies.
Drive
the organization toward student/parent focus.
Reduce
the hierarchy to enhance freedom to act.
Allow
flexibility for changes in student/parent/community requirements.
Enhance
partnerships with parents, vendors, unions and communities.
Cut the
time required to make decisions.
Maximize
capacity for organizational learning.
Simplify
work and reduce bureaucracy.
Support
individual and team accountability for results.
Support
fundamental process improvement and redesign.
Minimize
organizational boundaries.
Achieve
deep change throughout the organization.
Reduce
the cost structure and/or change factor productivity.
Make the
public organization the K-12 supplier of choice.
Processes
The next list takes a swipe
at identifying the intrinsic processes or flows that are ever present in an
organization’s execution of planning and operations, whether by design or
simply because they are endogenous to human player interaction and function in
the organization. Key is that they
be recognized and understood at minimum, and be subject to mediation where they
become causal factors for school performance.
Processes and flows
intrinsic to organizations:
Tasks,
teaching, administrative, or support assigned to the unit or subunit.
Within
the unit or subunit, whether the tasks are interdependent with each other and
whether they are intensively interdependent, i.e., whether their performance is
governed by feedback for achievement.
Task
interdependence across the boundaries of subunits and reciprocal interdependence that puts the greatest
stress on organization decision-making.
Task
variability, task difficulty and task impingement, i.e., task interdependence
with core function or technology in the firm.
Task
function based on local knowledge or driven only by RRPP (rules, regulations, policies,
procedures).
How
people groupings are required to facilitate task achievement.
Knowledge
accumulated or disbursed from any given segment of the organization.
Knowledge
categorized by type – discipline, community, financial, personnel,
technological, student, parent, school values, school goals, competitive view
of charters, school status in a state, etc.
Information
flows of all types, within any subset of the organization.
Information
flows between lateral units or subunits of the organization.
Information
flows, bilateral, vertically between layers of the organization.
Properties
of the information flows, i.e., periodicity, variability, turbulence, predictability,
digital, formats.
Capacities
to analyze, decide, act, override, cause review, redirect a flow, in methods to
be allowed, variance in teacher performance allowed, where and when to change
methods or curricula, when and where to hire, when and where to start or
curtail task performance.
Capacity
to determine speed of choice or action.
Intrapreneurship
permitted, i.e., units permitted that are disengaged from others for specific
purposes like innovative development.
Degree
to which self-interest is encouraged, permitted.
Authority
dispersed, only downward.
Informal
authority, from knowledge or charisma, and acceptance.
Whether
unit or sub unit has operative authority, i.e., right to carry out
responsibility
and right to determine within reason how it will be executed.
Clique
formation laterally, defensive or offensive.
Inherent
conflicts in either operating goals or authority positions created within or between
units and sub units.
Capacity
to rotate assignments.
Whether
there are formal boundary spanning roles, e.g., between school and union,
school and the private sector, school and state authority.
All of the above without
more school context are quite abstract, but become regular events or
perturbations in any ongoing organization. When clothed in the fabric of actual practices within a
school (or any other organization) they become dynamics that are either managed
or become sources of irritation or conflict, and capable of effecting the
organization’s composite performance.
Prospect
The above are
not prescriptive, unquestionably exploratory, not ready for PowerPoint or framing. But except for this blog’s penchant for
diving into topics where there is education currency plus controversial positions
to be plumbed, it was always intended to be an experimental laboratory and
creative platform for ideas, the more diverse the better.
Next post will attempt
to look at the functional contents of a K-12 school system in the context of
the above abstractions and conceptual design factors. Where that process will carry the analysis is an unknown,
but it has a lot of theoretical company and has served over time as a platform
for assessing real organizations. Come back for the next session.
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