Forward
Welcome
to this reboot of the Edunationredux blog, on pause since the first of 2017,
for dual reasons.
First,
an impression developed as last year ended that a fragile truce had occurred,
between the diverse group of corporate or school reform groups, and our public
school systems in general. Many
rural systems, and systems protected from the reform culture, are still
clueless that they have been in an education war.
Aggressive
standardized testing initiatives appeared to have softened, perhaps because of
parental opt-out movements across the country. On the opposite side of the reform skirmishes, our public
schools appear to have absorbed and more or less complied with our states’
commitments to that flawed mode of assessment – an uneasy peace, but peace.
In fact,
I believe my judgment that was reality was badly flawed. The lull in fights was
less a truce than the year’s massive outpouring of campaign rhetoric, burying
the media’s interest in education, which doesn’t sell stuff as effectively as
juicier press.
In
addition, our presidential campaign rarely mentioned our nation’s education
issues, not a great thing for our nation’s future knowledge health.
The
second reason was waiting for the Betsy DeVos’ shoe to drop, revealing the
mission our barely elected US Secretary of Education would pursue in her
tenure. That didn’t take long, and
the mission, an extreme ideological, and educationally ignorant focus seems to
be the destruction of public education, via aggressive promotion of schools’
conversion to charters, and a pre-Enlightenment retreat to religious delusion
of prior centuries.
But the
DeVos vision has a few glitches.
Recently,
Lee Hamilton, former 34 year Congressman, and one of our class acts last
century as a centric legislator who worked across the aisle, authored an
editorial. Its purpose, optimism
for America. Its argument, that
our major institutions, with deep roots, can survive a Trump White House, white
supremacists, racism, hate venues, and international challenges, and are
resilient.
A thesis
here is that America’s public school system, with origins deep
in our nation’s history, has similar properties: Massive, systemic, embedded in our grass roots, resistant to
attack, and resilient even if sluggish.
A
challenge for privatization of schools, but perversely, a challenge as well for
thinking Americans who can see beyond local tribalism, and want to see our
public school systems become current, find reinvention, find excellence, find
innovation, advance real learning, and discover service versus self-service.
In
effect, trying to destroy our public school system is just as difficult as
reforming it.
Today's blog explores that resistance to change.
The subsequent blog will explore the diverse human beliefs and opinions
that have powered the motivations of both our public systems' die-hard
defenders, and its would-be reformers.
Stepping
onto the school reform battlefield is not for the timid, nor those who cannot
tolerate ambiguity.
Read on…
Sorry Betsy, It Is a System, and Mega One To Boot
For readers not steeped in
Greek and Roman mythology, the “Gordian Knot” symbolized an intractable
problem, solved either by great creativity, or Alexander the Great’s more
aggressive sword stroke.
As implied by the Forward to today’s blog, the belief is that 34 years of attempts to reform
America’s public schools, initially dubbed “corporate reform,” have devolved
into: Political odd couples hammering public K-12; a maze of arguments;
simplistically positioning the problem as public schools versus privatized
charters; whether standardized testing has improved or impeded learning in our
K-12 venues; corporate testing profiteering and scams; and whether waving an “its
choice” banner is legitimate or the big lie?
At the front of this 34-year
reform parade is, what launched the attack on public education; trailing and to
this day, why are public systems seemingly oblivious to the attack? Along the way what
has happened to once at least defensible and literate debate, was also public education’s
biggest mistake, reductionism. Our reform agendas perpetrated the same fault, making alleged reforms shortsighted and
prone to sub-optimization.
Contrary to the stupidity parroted by Betsy DeVos in recent
speechmaking, our education complex, of public-private-charter-Catholic-et al.,
schools, along with home schooling, along with the peripheral and support
organizations married to those systems, is a mega-system. It behaves like
a system, has the mixed constituencies of a system, has millions of
interconnected metaphorical parts and intersecting processes, and can’t be
understood much less manipulated without being addressed by systems theory.
Drilling down further, it is actually a series of nested systems,
starting at a practical level with the ’school’ (with more constituent parts of
a system) as the unit of analysis, moving to district, to state, with an
overlay of selective Federal controls that inject ideology and politics into
its standards and patterns of management, and now imposition of ‘market.’
(One could argue the first unit of analysis is the individual student, but the
powers of ten that introduces to variables blows the computer’s fuse.) And, frankly,
like our models of climate change, we aren’t currently smart enough, nor do we
have the tool-power to effectively or seamlessly build an education TOE (theory
of everything) explanation.
Pragmatism That Smarts
Consider the
interlaced fabric of our systems: 50 states with differing ideologies,
controlling both teacher licensing, school policy, and performance assessment,
and failing individual system/school oversight via BOE; teachers’ unions that
have seriously lagged learning’s evolution and blocked change; a U.S.
Department of Education lacking the Constitutional authority to actually
reframe K-12, but now egregiously politicized, with the selective power to
disruptively control some aspects of school policy; a population of schools of
education, that once you get past the top institutions are some of the most
intellectually obsolete stars in the postsecondary firmament; and the dug in
resistance to change in our collective public schools.
The teachers’ unions
constitute another major barrier to public system reform and creative
change. At the national level
their leaderships represent at least thinking management. At the local chapter levels their
representation quickly becomes wholly self-serving and corrosive with an
anti-management bias brought to every negotiation and contract.
Do the approximate counts: 1,200 schools of education; 99,000
public schools; 14,000 districts; some unknown number of school administrators
who never grace a classroom, plus an unknown number of school bureaucrats,
ditto; 30,861 private schools; 6,800 Catholic schools; 6,400 charters; 60+/- MM
students; 2MM home schooled students; 3MM teachers; and funding from the
Federal government (12.7%), from
states (43.5%), and local taxes (43.8%); the NEA, AFT, and some unknown number
of local union chapters; and an alphabet soup of school vendors.
How do you even
fashion a model of school changes relevant in this complex population; the
answer may be you can’t short of nationalization of all entities providing K-12
delivery. In our present state of societal warfare and leadership angst,
that doesn’t look like a high probability option.
We need the awareness and the ‘big data’ set needed to scope and
understand the larger system, leaving a massive enigma. Even with information, how do you change
it in the large, even by fiat or metaphorically using a chainsaw without
degrading it; witness what the ignorance, ideology, and corporate
bastardization of standardized testing and how it has impeded real learning? The logical counterpoint is, segment
the system to corral the problems, see smaller groups to address. Good science-based logic, but without
the kind of universal and comparable interstate censuses or sampling that
demands, not doable.
Defeatism?
It may appear so, but in the world of research and creativity the
scene calls for genuine problem solving.
We can outline the elements and relations among the parts that
ball up to our mega-system. None are mysterious if some thinking is
applied. What gums up the works are two major roadblocks: One, our
nation, states and the Federal government, have never invested in properly doing
a census of our education systems, providing comparability of school structure
and performance information; and two, our states have never chosen to require
the right school reporting or coordinated thinking or action on school
oversight, as has occurred on other issues of state governance that have
universal venue.
One pathetic example is the ‘board of education.’ Requirements to serve on a BOE are dictated by each state,
haven’t changed in half a century, and have been obsolete close to that
long. The results from incompetent and even corrupt BOE are that those
boards are unaccountable, and school leaderships basically unaccountable.
The hypocrisy is palpable: While our alleged reformers are challenging
students and teachers threatening both for “accountability,” enforced by flawed testing, the real culprits are simply
ignored.
Let’s get down in the real dirt of a public
school, the site of this blog, New Bremen, OH, a physically attractive, but civically
despotic rural community. It has a ‘pretty’ school system, perpetually hyped, that may be the most mediocre
and corrupt public system in Ohio, already not graced with educational
excellence.
Three of its BOE seats are up for replacement in November with six candidates.
The history of this system (utterly opaque and resistant to voter
transparency in this century) has been manipulation of BOE elections, arguably to
suppress oversight and help advance levies, and its BOE’s poor choices of
leadership all of this century. The community equates education with
plastering its mascot “Cardinals” decal on every inanimate object and vehicle in
sight.
For the upcoming BOE election a proposal was made, backed up with
the resources to execute it; have the six candidates do at least one debate,
or submit to competent questioning about their qualifications to serve, and of the
knowledge and beliefs they would bring to the BOE’s function. Either
would be recorded and offered repetitively to voters on the local CATS
channel. The response of the village’s
leadership was ‘deafening silence.’ The school system’s action: Allegedly feeding the six candidates four softball
and platitudinous questions, publishing the oft times banal answers in its school
newsletter.
You can romanticize the nobility of our local schools, and launch
bleeding-heart scenarios about their overworked and noble teachers, and competent
superintendents. The reality is that there are superb and dedicated
teachers and excellent school organizations — we are clueless how many or what
fraction of the whole. There is
also some unknown fraction of the teachers in those classrooms not competent in
the disciplines taught because of the typical education degree. Plus some
teachers psychologically unfit to be there. More frequent than the nation deserves, are poorly vetted
superintendents chosen by incompetent BOE, lacking managerial awareness or
expertise and sometimes ethics, many self-serving versus candidates for
“servant leadership,” and some who should be removed from education.
At the other end of the academic spectrum those 1,200 schools of
education range from credible schools to last century’s education thinking
built around discredited methods and classroom tactics, versus models of
learning proven by research, and the disciplinary knowledge that originates
with our social and hard scientists.
The failure of many to most of those schools to embrace other
disciplines, demand higher standards for admittance, and to ignore exploding
learning technologies, are in the opinion of some of our best education leaders
a critical cause of teaching failures, and of the present reform agendas.
The result is, the grossed up bulk of America’s public education remains resistant to updating its
knowledge of learning, resistant to innovation, and clustering around
mediocrity. The key point, again, we have no mechanism at present to
accurately determine what that school system, capital S, really is? The
parallel question; how do you reform and improve something this complex that
you can’t even define?
What are the Options?
The already complex
combination of K-12 school markets/environments served x varied qualities of
oversight x 50 states’ bureaucracies x n communities’ cultures, complicates the
vision of creating acceptable homogeneous reforms across multiple school
functions and goals. Even from the spare description above it seems clear
there is no single track for public education’s improvement if the notion is
timely change. It took public schools over a half century to start
failing some of their missions; changing that is formidable.
Federal action can’t do the
task without Constitutional amendment. State venues short of a major
conceptual model change seem mission impossible. Large quality
variances of local systems hinder some local but viral movement taking off.
Lastly, the myriad and layered controls on and dictates to local systems
are also barriers to upgrading standards of performance for either management
function or academic/learning performance.
But one scalable option is the grass roots one; building on the
defensible concept of local control, each system steps up and reinvents itself.
Sweet -- but likely without an epiphany and major battles only if you
believe in the tooth fairy.
Communities themselves are
formidable barriers to productive change. In the rural site of this blog,
a long history of inbred influence, bigotry against outside views, missing
ethical standards, and a basically marginally educated electorate have warped
support and intellectually cheated its local system of proper critique. But
also illustrated for decades, even poorly educated communities have regularly seen
the need for the nation's public schools to get better even if that is just
vague and intuitive. But they also
inevitably think their system is just
fine. Witlessly joining hands to defend a local school that’s flawed because
it’s ours – the case for this reference site – shuts down any chance for
modernization and pursuit of improvement and excellence.
Lastly, the nightmare
scenario, by some despotic maneuver the rate of conversion of public schools
into charters is dramatically increased. Seems far-fetched, and by virtue
of Murphy’s Law, it would still take decades to successfully root out and
destroy much of our dug-in public school infrastructure, likely going into
resistance mode as self-preservation further reducing public transparency.
Conclusion
The conceptual
argument is that to change the U.S. public system, products of over a century
of acculturation, built from almost uncountable agreements and accommodations
among government levels, higher education, vendors, unions, advocates, human
resources, and local civic entities, all would need to be transformed without
killing the host. Because that is
truly an education “Gordian Knot,” one version of an answer is, mission impossible.
Another is that
runaway populism and activism could tip the boat. That possibility has long been considered not likely even in
America’s worst days. But the
instability engulfing our current political venues, clashing ideologies based
on emotion and extremism, and the nation’s increasingly inequitable
distribution of national resources and sustainable human resource employment, make
that not impossible anymore; though one prays not likely.
Among that set of not very tasty alternatives, the most likely to
fit both America’s penchant for representative democracy as
long as we can keep it, and the freedom to act even imprudently or not at all,
is a model that would use the mechanism of 'local control.' That would require I believe, a capacity
to rigorously vet, again, a good part of our present local schools’ human
resource bases, foment tax revolts to force school cost reductions and
productivity gains, see major citizen investment in adult self-education, and
have emerge some intellectual Pied Pipers with the capacity to start a viral
movement for reinvention of individual school systems. All hard, uphill work.
The pretty grim most likely case is simple, based on the physical principle
of inertia applied to large complex systems; either stasis or movement to some
alternative (hopefully improved) model of learning and alternative organization
of the functions but at a glacial pace.
Even this marginal hope seems distant, because of the mass of
self-interest and cultural bias the nation has allowed to be built into present
public schools.
Missing in today’s blog, but central to understanding how America
managed to flunk education 101 for over 34 years, and perhaps much of last
century, is lifting the lid on the human factors, and ideologies, and values
that have swirled throughout the unfolding of public education for a considerable
time. Many were simply invisible to most of us, or out of political
correctness submerged as consciousness, yet have shaped and sometimes
critically damaged the nation’s pursuit of both equitable and world-leading
learning excellence.
The next blog will dig into that murky territory.
