This is a postscript to the prior Edunationredux post on
“nature versus nurture” as explanation for success or failure of present public
K-12 reform strategies. While previously asserting a blog on hiatus, the holiday respite, and the “polar vortex” time-out created opportunity
for reflections on whether U.S. public schools are positioned, thanks to 2013’s
developments, to be better or on track for more conflict in 2014?
Reflections on a Year's Posts
If word count of rhetoric about
public K-12 reform was an analog for wisdom of the current evolved patterns of
public school challenges now transferred to our states, America’s public
education system would be soaring.
That it is not, as evidenced by muted results from the bodies of testing
heaped onto its students and teachers, should carry a message to our nation.
Techniques, Tests,
and Technology Are Not Strategy
An issue is that over time,
school and classroom tactics, and local complexity, have muddied the focus
needed on the core strategic factors, players, and movements that have become
reform’s footers. Tactical
improvements have emerged in classroom pedagogies, in technology, from neural
research findings, in school administrative attitudes, and in teachers’ commitment
to the learning mission, but the assertion is this collective will not modify
the basic public K-12 system. There is no coherent core to present reform;
though ideologies and motivations may be discrepant for players from The Business
Roundtable to Obama/Duncan, actions have by ignorance and misplaced passion
similarly evolved to the present motif of testing, VAM, grade, and punish.
Literally as this was being
framed, the monthly online offering from eSchool News appeared in my
inbox. Infuriatingly
optimistic, packed with the latest technology and gizmos that might fill a
classroom and create new markets for tax dollars, the articles are bubbly and
oblivious of the reality that this educational equivalent of the 2014 Consumer
Electronics Show has no foothold in real learning reform.
Another problem is that the
message is not even vaguely understood by most of our population, and likely by
most of the state legislatures slavishly, and frequently unthinkingly, politically
conforming by plugging state grades for schools as a mechanism to force
remediation. Widespread adult
ignorance about how learning happens K-12, coupled with highly variable local
control, has created a culture where school mediocrity is simply accepted by
the public as good enough, tragic distortion of the anthem that “perfection is
the enemy of good.”
Plunging to the bottom line, the three-decade odyssey of corporate
reform has been a loser; there is no kinder depiction of the misplaced
ideologies, partisanship, preoccupation with classroom magic, dogmatism that
has blocked acceptance of better models for learning, and public education’s own
follies that have produced that effect.
But at this juncture, blame isn’t even good prologue. Let the historians sort the
culprits.
What Constitutes a
Strategic Difference?
Our nation’s system of nearly
100,000 public schools is in some learning nether land. There are likely great public K-12
schools – that have with guts simply finessed the testing misdirection –
achieving the learning more prescient critics have called out as the
mission. There are schools
mediocre but feigning excellence, and there are still losers not called out by
present testing.
Perhaps the first, most
pejorative big picture is that we are simply blindly swinging at our school
performance challenges because there are no comprehensive data. It will take a national census of all
K-12 schools and classrooms, going beyond counts of free lunches, to construct
a platform for good diagnoses of where and how public K-12 learning is failing.
The second strategic factor is
the mixed bag of local control.
There are likely knowledgeable BOE also possessing the awareness that
local control is applicable to local tax-based funding, and some
education issues, but that contemporary learning has ceased being “local,” and
their students exit to a world arena if they have been fortunate enough to
acquire the contemporary knowledge that will now produce a job.
A third major outcome set reflects
recent research findings indicating that children in environments characterized
by poverty and related disadvantages experience in early childhood
physiological neural development deficits; not just neural net development
issues, but actual deficits in neural gray matter. These findings, if they do not totally invalidate the
Obama/Duncan approach to erasing related learning deficits, do throw a major
monkey wrench into reasoning and ideology that have cost America double-digit
billions of wasted Federal reform dollars. More egregious than the dollars, a dogmatic U.S. Department
of Education leadership, by failure to think in terms of contingencies, has
heaped on public K-12 education a decade of major opportunity costs.
Fourth on the list, hundreds of
millions of dollars have been poured into trying to turn multiple-choice, and
now computerized testing into the proverbial silk purse, and attacking any
critique of standardized testing.
In a smarter reform league, the thrust would have been doing the
research still in arrears to discriminate the learning models most applicable
in early learning stages, versus later styles and learning progression, and develop
testing models that mirror higher order learning. This and retro classroom methods beliefs are, in turn, the
strategic legacies of our collegiate schools of education, that checked out of
the learning game decades ago, shunning the academic integrity and prescience to
reform the genre.
A fifth and almost inexplicable
piece of public school insanity has been the “zero tolerance” mindset that has
inflicted unjustified harm and jeopardized children’s futures. It has been a mindset – ranging from
knee jerk reactions to silliness – that was never backed up by sound reasoning
and psychological intelligence, but was simply adopted slavishly by public
school leaderships seeking to deflect political criticism. The backlash to this chunk of public
education malfeasance has finally overtaken practices abhorrent to a rational
society.
The last strategic item is likely
to provoke both debate and defensive cries if not attacks on the
messenger. It is, that a material
fraction of public education’s administrators is presently unfit or
ill-prepared to manage our nation’s public schools. Public education’s managerial class has come off the rails
over several decades. Reasons are
multiple and complex: The roles of
a superintendent have become far more complex, attracting human resources who
are not “Mr. Chips;” there is a major dearth of contemporary managerial
awareness in those who seek administrative assignments in K-12, a product of
incompetent collegiate education for managing education; public K-12
organizational design is obsolete and has been for a half century, leaving
slack for superintendents and administrative specialists to define roles and
manipulate resources without adequate oversight; and that same failure of much local
BOE oversight (fully analogous to failed oversight of private sector ethical
dysfunction) has allowed the emergence of Lord Acton’s dictum, power that turns
even potentially competent administrators into ineffective and self-righteous
leadership.
Who Should Be the
Change Agent?
While identifying the culprits in
the learning destruction being created among public schools may be a chore for
the historian, there is one question that must be on any future change agenda –
that is, how did a system of almost 100,000 schools, and almost 3.5MM teaching
and administrative human resources, allow ideological and partisan manipulation
of the public system to go forward without protest of the effects on the
learning of a nation’s children? Did
our teachers’ unions myopically fumble the most important role of the countervailing
power they corralled? Are our
teachers and administrators simply a generation of cowards? Does the old chestnut, “those who can’t
do teach,” contain some truth?
Does the concept of “servant leadership” need to be the tattooed on
every newly minted school CEO? For, based on the earlier arguments, and
from prescriptions of our best and brightest for organizational learning, the
only coherent potential mass culture for actually reforming public K-12 has to
be the public education establishment itself.
If there is an overarching
strategic issue that fades the proliferation of technical and tactical
mechanisms for change, and that determines whether a future America will get
back into creating public education excellence, it has to be, when will public
education’s professional work force demonstrate the courage and intellect to
step up and take back its public schools?
If that means stomping on a teacher’s union, or taking up a collection
for Arne Duncan’s ticket back to Chicago, or booting an arrogant or
dysfunctional superintendent or principal, or challenging an uninformed BOE, or
telling a sub par state education department to go back to school, or calling
out parental failures impeding their progeny’s learning, or making a bonfire
out of state standardized tests, perhaps that is what it is going to take.
An interview with Lee Iacocca (of
Chrysler fame, and resurrecting a quote by Thomas Paine – “Lead, follow, or get
out of the way”) in a recent national magazine caught my attention. The interviewer’s questions drifted to
the state of present U.S. leadership.
Mr. Iacocca’s response mirrors the binding constraint in getting U.S. public
education as a class to get out of its foxhole or off its knees and tackle
reform. It was: “Where is the
outrage?”
Great question.
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