America's Education Gordian Knot

Edunationredux Reboot

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.