Psyching Out the “Knot” - Part II

Forward

Counting the Ways to Fail

The stated purpose of blog two of this sequence was to explore the motivational complexes mediating the choices and behaviors of the masters of our public schools, as well as the organizations with their tentacles either in or around those systems.  It was likely misstated, because the balled up composite of diverse reasons for choices reaches massively beyond the scope of this blog; but the complexity of the mission can be painted.

Before launching blog two’s POV, the measure of alleged public school reform was taken in an excerpt from Dr. Diane Ravitch’s book, Reign of Error, linked here.  This excerpt should be required reading for every education civilian.  Another reading of note is a speech by educator Stan Karp, “Challenging Corporate Ed Reform,” linked here.  Both citations set the scene for this blog sequel.

Initiating this post’s arguments, I stopped counting the players connected to any public school, either supporting or otherwise influencing how that system functions (see Note A).  Critical, they may or may not be a constructive influence.  Some may be resource-eaters, using school funding for interests that do not deliver the prime function, learning. Even where the diversion of assets may be minimal, the normative mission of a school can be perverted, to feed egos or personal missions. Unfortunately, even tragically, the latter two factors are probabilistically far too common in the case of public school and system superintendents lacking integrity and or competence; the same failings are even more prevalent for obsolete BOE nominally charged with providing that leadership.

It may not be overstatement to single out 50 states’ systems of elected BOE school oversight as 'the greatest failure in American public education;' putting frequently unprepared strivers who are clueless about learning, and frequently reach those seats (immune for four years to public oversight if they’re dishonest or unprepared) by manipulated nominations and sans any legitimate testing of their capacities to serve. Right behind BOE are school administrators, chosen poorly and with the wrong criteria by those same BOE.  Rapidly overtaking the priors, Betsy DeVos, who because of education ignorance, or demagoguery promoting school privatization, is trying to sell the big lie that school ‘choice’ is the equivalent of a decision about buying something in your local super, and effectively made by people who may themselves be clueless how and where their child should be educated.

Whose Reasons Matter?

The stock answer is they all do.  The realistic answers are two.  It depends on the weight of their impact, their incidence, and when in school functions that occurs.  Add if the mission is more than explanation, but prediction and calibration of inputs versus school performance, the means of acquiring that intelligence becomes a technical monster.  By that criteria, we can bypass more of the list if the issue is assessing one community's system.  The rest of the factors can be further segmented, but the highest priority operating variables are those directly effecting the classroom and achieved learning.

In terms of impact and persistence of effect the issues reduce to a school's interface with its state education bureaucracy and representation; with a BOE; the quality of a school's superintendent and principals; the distribution of motivations of the teaching corps; the presence and permitted clout of a local union; and a frequently anonymous cluster of parents or school advocates who become entrenched in school strategy and influence its management. The ignorance, integrity, and real motivations of its BOE's members, the same for the prior group, have a major impact, frequently suppressing change and improvement of a system or creating discriminatory choices.

The above impacts are rarely factored into the critique, writ large nationally, in assessments of where and why American K-12 public schools are lagging our expectations, allegedly the driving force behind 34 years of "reform" that has accomplished little except terrorizing a generation of our children, and confounding teachers with misapplied and frequently flawed mechanical testing and specious value-added logic.  Even as finite a task as arraying Maslow’s "Hierarchy of Needs" against key players' psychological needs in serving a single system, is out of reach without primary research missing for a century.

Because we have never chosen to scientifically study and measure any of these variables for even an isolated system, or for a valid sample of our 99,000 schools, or executed a census of that universe, or even consistently supported additive qualitative research, the evidence to make good judgements is missing in action.  Yet, at the lowest common denominator, understanding the functions, processes, and getting a generic model of a school is a major building block to getting smarter about what’s been created and its breakdowns.  It is not too pejorative a representation, that ‘public education as an establishment,' intellectually inbred, and self-righteous, has been the principal impediment to letting some sunlight shine on failed evolution of methods and igniting genuine reform.

Hope?

In the 34 years of our public schools being flogged by reform missions, undermined by failed methods, our systems can stake one paradoxical claim to fame; in the face of the weapons aimed at them, they have persevered in following the strategic game plan that emerged from public education’s inbred evolution.  Public schools as a system became one of America’s most consistent version of common goals.  Part of that likely is the motivation of most of its critical participants — 3.2 million teachers — believing they are creating the greater good by focusing on what has come out of their education for education, and our 50 states’ striving to carry out their learning delivery missions.

Simultaneously, in those 34 years our capacities to understand neural processes — specifically learning — have expanded well beyond the school establishment’s capacity to adopt and understand it.  Hence, over enough time, the limitations of the education provided has left a learning gap triggering attempted change.  In parallel, the tools now available have begun to close on the questions, and now might become one type of fix for our schools.

The tools to study, predict, and assess are out there.  Better human resource decisions from both psychology and organizational behavior — better information bases from statistical modeling and computer size and speed — better phenomena definitions from sensing evolution — better composite modeling of education from mathematical simulation, and emerging artificial intelligence permitted by digital methods and computer processing speeds.  

If one were to lay out a research program designed to bring our public system into this century it might feature in sequence:  Sampling of our schools nationally, with the goal of using current organizational modeling to understand with greater clarity school functions and behaviors; using the prior and simulation logic plus experimentation to understand how various school properties effect classroom performance — and by doing the former build an understanding how the major factors in education influence both the total costs of our systems, and their true value-added.

Part of that value-added involves better and timely understanding of the nation’s real learning needs.  They have never been a fixed entity.  A vital need has become retreat from the naive view that every American needs to enter kindergarten preparing for a college education.  The nation’s need for skilled resources has become a silent but pervasive crisis, fed by the arrogance to assume that class equals a degree.  The assets to install and maintain our infrastructure are retiring faster than they can be replaced.  The conflation of physical skills and ‘class’ is undoing America. Our culture would benefit beyond words by the emergence of skilled craftsmen and technical resources who are equally our cultural and arts contributors.  Eric Hoffer, philosopher longshoremen, fits the niche.  A second value-added is divergent from human evolution, offsetting technology.

That step beyond has already been demonstrated by IBM in expanding the capability of its signature “Big Blue” model using AI (artificial intelligence) to address diagnostic medicine and more.  The eventual extension of that approach to school decision making could enable far more effective choices among the services that both our states and the Federal government must field in future.  These kinds of research have been either pooh-poohed or never understood by the education establishment, but as our present total establishment shivers and shakes around the US in 2017, that might optimistically be an opening to rewrite the game plan to evolve our schools, and in a more productive manner than running them through a privatization meat grinder.   Importantly when you lift the lid, charters are proving materially a 'hollow man.'

Lack of Hope?

Counterpoint is exploding the myth of public system defenders, that “running a school in a business-like fashion" is a sell-out or contradictory to best education principles.  There is a major distinction between running a K-12 school as a business, a categorically false goal, and administering a school system using contemporary management and communications theories.  The pivot in the reasoning is recognition that a school is incontestably a complex organization, subject conceptually to all of the puts and takes of that arrangement of resources set against a backdrop of a mission, strategies, tactics, information flows, human motivation and activation, and all of the principles footing use of and accounting for resources employed and their productivity.  Most school administrators, unless they have received formal education in management, et al., are clueless that those highly developed principles, along with data management and pursuit of innovation, apply to any formal school (Indiana University, finally recognizing that education deficit, has developed an MBA degree specifically for public school administrators).  Both our public school education ‘establishment,' heads in the sand, and the business universe assuming education awareness not there, have been culpable in creating still another roadblock to an education truce in our time.

Ratings of states’ schools abound in the media, many lacking much credibility, based on averages of flawed and dissimilar test scores, or teachers’ salaries, or some other simplistic metric.  The ratings may be fluff, but a major public school deficit in a paranoid and fragmenting society is the failure of our public schools to effectively communicate with their real owners.  Curiously, one of the obscured measures of public education, and surrogate of quality may be the truthful, hype-free transparency of a system’s delivery of information to its community.  In some of our genuinely excellent school systems, the operations of its leadership and BOE are delivered by CATS, by openness about all academic decisions, by the integrity of a rare BOE that pro-actively invites citizen exposure to a board’s deliberations versus cover-ups, and by regular presentation to the community of briefings or competent publication of a system’s operations.  This mission rarely is served by the frequently amateurish and hyped ad hoc newsletters that issue, reliance on gossip, or reliance on many of the press ill-prepared to deal with education issues.

There was a rather harrowing episode of the popular TV series, “Blue Bloods,” where one of the ‘family’ was in jeopardy from internal corruption.  A breakthrough comes with the comment of the assistant commissioner, to an investigator, sotto voce.  The series writers created a memorable albeit folksy punch line, but it fits here:  "The bluebird of happiness may be in your own backyard.”

A more formal statement of that concept is a major principle of contemporary organizational design:  Where operations are at the boundary of an organization, keep the supporting decision making close to their execution consistent with the capacity of the human resources tasked.  This aligns with a proposed reform of the early 20th century and obsolete 'production model' of our schools, to put learning initiatives in the hands of the teachers in the classroom, and school decision making close to the community rather than in state bureaucracies. Conversely, the concern with the concept of putting oversight of an increasingly technology-driven school system in hands of a traditional BOE may have far more to do with the capacity of that oversight than its basic principle.

Ends and Means?

The US needs a new institution, the educational equivalent of the public accounting and auditing firm.  A collaboration of our state leaderships, their universities and colleges, and appointed action groups with the authority to take apart and reassemble local systems, then become their resident oversight and advisory source of school strategic direction.   Return full executive leadership of a school to a new brand of education administration, resources provided dual expertise in learning science and management, professionally recruited and vetted, subject to the prior auditing function.  Trash the amateur BOE, but make ‘local control’ a meaningful narrative.

The US needs a major rethinking of most of its schools of education.  For a long time, the impression offered by our universities has been that they either do not value a school of education — a simmering conflict between the self-righteousness of ‘higher’ education, and the consequent resentment among primary and secondary educators for their lower status assignment. Or they lack the courage to internally reform those schools, perhaps fearful that to start the process might spread by popular demand to other disciplines overdue for modernization.  Our increasingly endowment-driven, socially irresponsible, and technologically lagging B-schools are one example; the last time they were critically reviewed and amended was 1960; over a half century appears a reasonable waiting period for the responsibility to resurface?

Another basis for creeping forward with options for needed reform of our public systems — not present versions of "corporate reform” — may be addressing the decades of overlooked organizational issues, and redesign of the basic primary/secondary schools' organization. Remodeling of its formulas for self-governance and work seem way overdue, perhaps over half a century?  A blog to be considered.

Lastly, while seemingly dwarfed by organizational and human resource issues that root our systems on the dysfunctional side (while keeping the ship afloat has pretty much been the gift of over 3 million teachers who are 'taking care of business' even in the face of failed leadership), what happens to activate and feed learning must be assessed and reformed. That means aggressive critique of the decades of methods nonsense and allowing obsolete knowledge to dominate especially 9-12 classrooms.  The rates of change in 'knowledge,' both embryonic and that correct the mountains of learning error being supplied by our public schools, may even increase, along with the need to adopt tools wholly missing in present education for education.  Something as basic as core learning's mechanisms -- e.g., the education developments by Dr. Marion Brady, running hard against the business-as-usual splattered in our public schools, is a change need.

A late arrival, and pretty much a stake through the heart of zombie standardized testing as a basis for alleged reform of our systems, is the just issued book by Harvard testing expert, Dr. Daniel Koretz.  His book, discussed and linked here:  Daniel Koretz, The Testing Charade:  Pretending to Make Schools Better. One has to presume, a very large batch of our public school administrators needs to open the book and read something besides their own press clippings for a change.  

Meanwhile, a few million public school teachers can feel a large measure of vindication.

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Note A:  The ‘players’ in public education, an abbreviated list:  POTUS; US Secretary of Education; its cast of anonymous bureaucrats; Congress, House & Senate committees and the whole; the National Governors Association; its bureaucracy (which incidentally consists heavily of education novices with MBAs); American Legislative Exchange Council (a lobbying and spear point for hard right-wing efforts); the Business Roundtable, that was a force in creating our standardized testing scams and misdirection of public school reform; National Education Association; American Federation of Teachers; state superintendents; state educational bureaucrats; state boards of education (not typically packages of intellect and objectivity, and typically riddled with political objectives and control); postsecondary schools of education; their university parental leaderships; local BOE in 50 states; local school administrators; those ubiquitous but typically anonymous teachers, our only real 'worker bees;’ local school non-teaching bureaucracies creeping up on more bodies than in the classrooms, contributing far less; local civic organizations, peddlers of school mascot gear; local business on rare occasions knowledgeable about learning but primarily when it is a profit opportunity; local training consortia now trendy, and on occasion staffed with human resources with more background than some machines' operations; state textbook boards pushing ideological solutions; textbook publishers, marginally discriminating in recruiting competent textbook writers, motivated primarily by the bottom line; test publishers and test processing, with even fewer ethics and greater profit thirst than their textbook divisions; every foundation with an ideological agenda; unnumbered billionaires who dabble in education without a clue what they’ve wrought; an assorted small army of true education scholars, but lacking the organization to make a difference; startups, e.g., Teach for America, both intellectually and motivationally flawed; Bill Gates and Eli Broad, who need both an education and a new hobby; parental interest groups, typically narrow-topic driven, and frequently clueless what an education system should be; the school board associations with more interest in power than education; our courts when episodically drawn into shaping schools’ functions in interpreting our education laws and disputes; and lastly, any curious local taxpayer with the smarts to know and employ a state’s ‘open records’ laws to petition a school system for transparency.