SQUINTS 19 November 2012 -- K-12 Reform: The Fog of War

The public K-12 reform movement that was initiated with NCLB has now been underway for a decade.  The perhaps unintended consequences of the alleged reform have expanded to expenditure of double-digit billions of taxpayer dollars without material K-12 improvement, and have taken on the properties of a cold war.  The protagonists have multiplied, in this election going beyond a government versus public education dyad, to engaging education's civilians, parents and voters as in Indiana's state superintendent race. 

As any conflict escalates, the categories of adversaries expand, and all can become enveloped in the "fog of war."  The term, coined by Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz in 1837, "seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign."  Our reform conflicts have now reached a stage where a growing question is; who is doing what to whom, and inferentially why?  Intentions may not be what they seem.

The Protagonists

The expanding list of competitors in reform now embraces:  Public education unions; our K-12 teachers under direct attack on a battlefield tilted to undercut them, and virtually without defensive weapons; public education's administrative bureaucracies and bureaucrats, distinct from its teacher foot-soldiers, some gingerly responding to the attacks on public K-12, some in denial and acting out retro dogmatism; states' departments of education frequently politicized; the US Department of Education and an Arne Duncan who may or may not represent either intellectualism or Federalism; political advocates such as Jeb Bush, arguably using public education as a whipping-boy to press a political aspiration; billionaire zealots such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, and others, who have become self-anointed thought promoters in education; one-cause advocates such as Wendy Kopp and Michelle Rhee with uncertain motivations that may include personal self-promotion; a growing number of professional students of education championing learning ideals over pragmatism; a Common Core State Standards Initiative with a murky provenance and mission; our states' Republican governors pushing an apparently party line advocating wholesale privatization of America's K-12 schools; a cabal of corporations supplying for profit the standardized tests and related scoring inundating K-12 schools nationally; some cluster of collegiate academics marketing their alleged expertise to push VAM teacher assessment models; collegiate schools of education almost invisible in foxholes; and finally as noted above, the general public is now becoming directly engaged.

Even the above narrative may not capture the subsets of public education contestants, or the reform enclaves, with still other motivations.

In this evolving mass of protagonists, the motivations of each becomes more and more difficult to clearly discern; what has become evident is that many of the players have values and mission objectives for the competition that have little to do with improving our nation's K-12 learning.  One theme that becomes clearer with every escalation of testing and attempted privatization, is that critically, political ideology is in danger of trumping pursuit of real learning.

The Fog of War

Consider some of the bizarre contradictions littering the present US K-12 reform venues:

• In numerous rural and suburban public K-12 systems and their bubbles, the public education enclave seems virtually oblivious to being challenged, covering their eyes and ears.  One explanation for the denial may be that one of the reform mission objectives seems other-worldly -- it would involve replacing almost 100,000 US public schools with privatized versions, and absorbing almost 3.5MM teachers, where there are presently few competently managed and successful takeovers of public K-12 systems.

• Most public schools, in turn, are acquiescing to respond to every test demand, even sacrificing teachers to discredited testing and VAM models to not offend the reformers and jeopardize funding. Simultaneously, most public education administrators can't surface the courage to address the simplest question:  Why do all of those folks hate us?

• Present organization of US public schools is over 100 years old, but has never been challenged, or allowed challenge, though behavioral concepts of organization have undergone major change and refinement.

• Hunkered down in this milieu are public school boards, an electorate, and even our press, who rarely see their own system as a problem (it's always the other community's system, and ours is just fine thank you), and are frequently too intimidated or trusting to demand system transparency and accountability.

• The so-called corporate reform movement, the authors of standardized tests and VAM teacher assessment, still lack credible research validating that standardized testing.  Yet the back room psychometricians in those firms are becoming the de facto arbiters of what constitutes K-12 knowledge in public schools.  That is frightening, not because there may not be reasonable knowledge awareness in that expertise, or even because the function is motivated by greed and control, but because the education system is essentially in danger of outsourcing without adequate quality assurance their basic stock in trade as an institution, and as professionals.

• Appearing in this week's mail was a nationally promulgated and passionate assault on the Common Core Standards -- the highly indignant basis, that they are the product of an overreaching Federal initiative.  Except the actual title of the process that developed these alleged standards is CCSSI, standing for "common core state standards initiative." Its own web site aggressively, even sarcastically, proclaims that the standards have absolutely nothing to do with the US Department of Education, or any other Federal initiative.  Adding to the bizarre assault, the standards' contents were overseen by a committee of some of the least impressive and highly parochial educational resources in the US.  To introduce even more weirdness, public K-12 is gobbling them up, when the educational values being represented are proximate to ones being expressed by some of those trying to torpedo public K-12.  

• Our collegiate schools of education, watching a Wendy Kopp and her "Teach for America" reap millions of dollars for advocating bypassing those same schools for our K-12 teachers, stay hunkered down and have shown even less visible awareness and defensive vitality than our public school bureaucracies.

• Lastly, repetitive studies dating even before the onset of this century and NCLB, have asserted and demonstrated evidence that virtually nothing in public K-12 education tactics that can be reformed can materially change the learning of children lacking stable families, or socioeconomically challenged, or culturally challenged, or experiencing unattended physical or psychological challenges, short of changing those familial, socioeconomic, cultural, and health basics.

Hello?

Digesting the above, one is tempted to actually believe that one sequela of quantum "string theory," that we may inhabit a multiverse, could humorously well be true. Metaphorically, the entire population of public K-12 education's protagonists and segmented participants in conflict could easily be viewed as existing in alternative universes.  The issue is, that as presently arrayed, public K-12 reform challengers and defenders are all over the map in mission objectives. Reform is still being positioned as a zero-sum game; public K-12 has to surrender for reform to win?  

On the other side of the skirmish line, a part of our public K-12 infrastructure and leadership is still living in a past century, self-righteous, resistant to learning innovation, many inadequately trained for the 21st century's knowledge and technology explosion, and either retreating into denial of the conflict, or willing to cheat and prostitute themselves to sustain control.

The US system of public school board oversight has its own challenges, either intimidated by system administration, or sycophant to an enclave that elected them, but regularly resistant to transparency and input.  Many boards enter their terms nobly, and with high aspirations, but are quickly subjected to conflicting local values and wants.  In many communities despite our states' low bar for candidacy, well educated candidates are elected, but still enter that service as educational neophytes.  What comes to dominate is risk aversion and concern with routine; versus properly vetting administrative hires, reducing K-12 school costs and resisting new levy solutions, modernizing budgeting and planning models, brainstorming how to increase learning productivity, lassoing out-of-control system bureaucrats, and putting learning objectives ahead of safe choices?

Where can you cut into the Gordian Knot?

Just appearing on the horizon, one factor that may change the game is a product of the 2012 election, not its outcome, but the grass roots processes it innovated, now virtually daily expanding and applied to citizens' capacities to be directly heard.  The Internet and social media have exploded the capacity to acquire within days and even hours, millions of virtual public signatures petitioning for redress of perceived wrongs, whether in governments or the private sector.  As person-on-the-street awareness of the public K-12 wars finally increases one game changer may be their direct entry into the fray.

At the opposite end of a continuum, it may take a top down political solution to end conflict, and restore American public education and K-12 stability and progress.

Growls and Fangs

This is like throwing one ribeye into a cage of hungry pit bulls, but reading of some real history of our founding suggests that the Founders, as prescient as they were, were clueless what would happen to knowledge of all aspects of this universe.  Imagine envisioning in the late 1700s, moving from buggy whips to Martian Rovers, to complex social diversity, to electrons replacing an abacus, the human genome and related genomes of all living organisms, to quanta to galaxies to dark matter/energy, or that an entire nation's citizens (in counts never conceived) would ever need a broad liberal as well as science-based education, and that it might need to be compulsory.

The Founders and Constitution did not factually and overtly dedicate public education control to the states, but simply had no basis for projecting learning for national parameters never envisioned, and that the process would need some central values and checks and balances.  It will infuriate our K-12 privatization and local control radicals, and it may not be the ultimate prescription for an entrepreneurial America, but any remediation of an untenable and unsustainable K-12 future, as being currently railroaded, may have to come from Constitutional change to allow more Federal integration and control of parts of our full K-12 education system.  

Education in America, standing just behind defense, and in close proximity to environmental remediation as a future harbinger, is arguably a function that should be selectively coordinated at a national level to end a war on learning.  The argument that genuine knowledge is now different in Mystical, TX versus Myopic, OH, versus Imaginary, IN, versus Funky, FL, or in any other population center in our nation, or materially depends on religious beliefs, is the thinking of those who categorically missed a genuine education.

PREVIEW -- NEXT SQUINTS

Next week's SQUINTS will turn upside down this week's exploration of the systemic differences and delusions surrounding present attacks on public K-12, focusing on a totally different unit of analysis, the individual public school. Ramming our K-12 schools with a testing bulldozer may appear to their critics as the only mechanism to change the functional performance of almost 100,000 public school entities, but it is not.  Incentivizing or coercing states, corporations, and even the Federal government to trash public K-12 may appear a cleverly leveraged approach, but to repeat an old saying that fits the venue, it is trying brain surgery with a meat ax.

If truth could be mandated, leaders of excellently managed contemporary firms would likely look on the present corporate reform movement as management that ranges from naive to failed, reflecting none of the factors that create private sector strategic and operating excellence.  One reform claim, that our public K-12 schools should be more "business like" reeks of hypocrisy.  That reform's testing and VAM advocacy simply fail every test of contemporary management wisdom, including the imposition of a retro concept of quality assurance discredited a half century ago.

The next SQUINTS will step out of the box and try something different, though hardly novel; looking at a school system conceptually as any other organization designed to fit, and that evolves to track its missions, outputting a complex product, requiring managerial excellence and creativity, working to balance long and short term goal maximization, facing all of the same problems as any other organization competing for resources and market leadership, subject to regulation, and accountable to multiple stake holders. The premise is any school can be conceptualized as such an operating system with analytical benefit.  Tune in next week.

SQUINTS -- Election 2012: Public K-12 Fallout

Although the subject of US K-12 public education seldom surfaced with any real effect in the presidential race – save a witless quote from Anne Romney suggesting that a “proper education” requires “throwing out the [public education] system" – there were and will be outcomes.

The Indiana Effect

Perhaps the most noxious result came in Indiana, where a majority of Indiana’s voters booted its prominent K-12 corporate reform advocate and Republican superintendent of education, for an experienced teacher who opposes the testing and related form of change Tony Bennett has been heavy-handedly imposing on its K-12 public schools.  Stung, present Governor Mitch Daniels in a rare breakdown in damage control, and Governor-Elect Mike Pence – far more an ideologue than Daniels – went despotic in rejecting the majority voters’ dislike for those reform tactics, stating in effect that they would just ignore the voters.  You jest, right; this is America, not the term coined by William Sydney Porter, a “banana republic?” 

The arrogance, and contempt for democratic process demonstrated may be just temporal political sour grapes, but it should also worry Indiana’s citizens.  Apparently those officials’ reasoning is that Indiana managed simultaneously and paradoxically to elect a Republican super-majority to its legislature, giving them the power to just ignore the electorate.  

Press Delusions

Almost as disquieting was Bloomington, IN’s Herald-Times, burying the story even though it went almost immediately to appearing in the The Washington Post.  The major press in a supposedly liberal and education-driven community, home base of Indiana University, the H-T’s editorial brain trust has consistently been in denial about the K-12 reform movement, and sycophant to its local school system.  That large scale system, representative of many that are good but not great, is being managed to produce defensible bureaucratic control of all the traditional mechanics of education.  All the right buttons are being pushed by its retro leadership to avoid being publicly vulnerable to criticism.  After its fifth superintendent in a decade, the system is back on track to turn out overall kids who have all the currently right answers to the questions on the state's testing.  What it may never turn out, except for those who do it on their own or led by their parents' wisdom, is overall kids who will ever creatively, and with intellectual courage, figure out those future right questions.  This is a pattern of denial and mediocrity that appears almost epidemic in some of this nation’s rural and suburban bubbles.

Erosion of Public Education

The jury as of this writing is still out on Washington State’s nth attempt to permit charter K-12 schools.  Defeated four prior times, this election cycle’s effort -- which will likely succeed -- was pushed by the dollars of billionaires targeting public education, including the nation’s gift to reform self-righteousness and educational naïveté, Bill Gates.  There is likely a large component of this nation that wishes Mr. Gates would finally get bored with K-12 education, and find a new hobby.

In the South, Georgia voters with greater enthusiasm approved the advance of their charters.  Hard to comment without researching the trajectory of public education’s effectiveness there, but the overall countervailing results suggest the continuing unfolding of a national division on attacks on public education; not a comforting thought at all given that the unsettling effects of reform efforts, including school-to-school migrations, may negate any gains from standardized testing even in narrow forced learning results.

The Most Egregious

Demonstrating the same prescience, not, about the election’s outcome, many of our media are now with equal alacrity claiming Mr. Obama in this re-election gained “a mandate.”  Not quite.

Even in achieving victory by grass roots effort, President Obama has seemingly failed to hear the education hoof beats, or reflect on the two basically failed and costly prior Federal programs (NCLB and RttT).  Hypocritically, he has repetitively acknowledged the need for real learning and developing critical thought, but seems ready to endorse the continuing challenge of US public schools and the testing orgy by retaining Arne Duncan, his Secretary of Education, who needs one.  Raises a question:  Is a basketball net thicker than a neural net?

While revolts are finally breaking out around the nation, promising to add to national divisiveness, but at least challenging the testing, VAM, vouchers and charters, America’s majority of Republican governors continues attempted destruction of public education.  The intellectual deficits in these attacks are breathtaking in their crude reasoning, even leaving in their wake corrupted systems and ersatz grading schemes, and in denial of just about every legitimate educational scholar’s warnings of the strategic learning risks. 

There are competent educational thought leaders in the US who could restore sanity to the US Department of Education (including Stanford’s Darling-Hammond, who parenthetically was Obama’s 2008 advisor on K-12, dumped in favor of a politically correct Duncan, or Diane Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education and one of our most knowledgeable and articulate advocates of multidimensional K-12 learning, and there are likely many more) and still push the mission of achieving K-12 learning gains among minorities and the economically and culturally challenged.  Mr. Duncan seriously needs to become unemployed (though we suspect that period of unemployment would be brief indeed, until he resurfaces in the executive ranks of one of America’s corporate testing vultures, or some corporate reform think tank, or another politically influenced education slot).

Trying to fathom the justification for the delusional belief that public education needs to be thrown out, however, is not the mystery many of our K-12 bureaucracy might believe.  A just published article, about Washington State’s referendum and the charter movement in The Atlantic magazine, routinely notes in its concluding paragraph what equally delusional public K-12 administrators just dismiss:  “Advocates for the schools, many of whom acknowledge the imperfection of the charter system, seem to agree on one thing: Public education in this country isn't adequate to its task, and it will take some trial and error to fix it. If nothing else, charter schools may be valuable experiments in how to teach.”

Why the Brouhaha Is a Quandary

Of all of the education miscues being recorded across the US, the ones of greatest portent and that have undercut many of this last decades’ attempts to grow and improve American K-12 are:  The ignorant and simplistic view that tomorrow’s effects of today’s decisions really don’t count (myopia); that our problems are just a matter of finding a silver bullet (the single-cause syndrome); and that we can restore 20^th century society on the premise it was more efficacious than where we now live (Pollyanna syndrome)?  Just a sidebar for the latter, if many Americans had learned any real US history in K-12, they would likely be running hell-bent in the opposite direction.

At the risk of repetition, both public education as we know it – because of decades of self-righteousness, arrogance, methods myopia, paranoia, along with the decline of collegiate schools of education – and a reform movement that is driven by political and the most simplistic market ideologies (whether it emanates from the White House or US financial/corporate silos), are equally the major causes of present K-12 conflict and potential damage.  Restoring learning that can sustain the nation over the next couple of contentious decades is not a zero-sum game.

Propagating in this reactionary neck of the US woods, and even in places like Bloomington, IN, or a Columbus with an OSU, and on, K-12 public systems exist in a delusional construction of K-12, an error that will eventually come home to roost.  Creativity, cutting edge changing the game, demanding ethical choices, adoption of real learning technologies rather than just their artifacts, even discovering budgeting and cost-benefit models, and putting ahead of state subservience the absolute responsibility and courage to support teachers who have a better grasp than most retro administrators of what the classroom can do, have more frequently been trashed than adopted.  Our public systems’ alleged leaders and most school boards have tumbled down Alice’s “rabbit hole,” fanning the belief that levies can be approved forever, that sports and parading fictional excellence in the form of test scores are more important than learning, and that parents can be and will stay suckered forever.

Truth or Consequences

With all the votes in, this election unfortunately sorted little that promises to materially ease the attacks on US public K-12.

In turn, why public K-12 is getting mauled by a so-called reform movement is hardly a mystery, except to the strata of educational bureaucracy that have gifted our equally flawed “reformers” the opportunity and temporary credibility to try to destroy US public education.  When history records this sad period in American history, its epitaph may be that both sides shot themselves in a vital place in a war that should never have occurred.  But as in most contemporary wars, the principal victims are still the non-combatants, children, and a society’s future viability, in this war because of the cheapening of learning in a nation that will need to master explosive knowledge growth and oncoming choices still being defined.

Major elections are alleged to trigger reflection, or should.  A great irony of current American life is that our Founders relied on the philosophies of The Enlightenment to fashion a nation that was supposed to get beyond the legacies of hundreds of years of European mysticism, social/economic stratification, and suppression of individual rights.  In turn, American history records a century of success in building compulsory education for all, along with a once stable public system of learning infrastructure.  Its evolutionary retreat from its creative roots, petrified pedagogy, and diminished education for education sees America stumbling into a 21^st century that will demand every neural net we can train.  Instead, our education wars now seem punctuated by a quote, circa 1546, attributed to English writer John Heywood:  "There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know.” 

Election 2012 has left American public K-12 well off course from a vector for achieving real learning in an unforgiving and accelerating knowledge environment, that won’t be assuaged by throwing bubble tests and/or computer tablets at the learners, or turning K-12 education infrastructure into a parody of the financial derivatives markets.

SQUINTS 5 NOVEMBER 2012...THE K-12 FOREST

Edunationredux has been offline for a breather, stimulated in part by a wish to distance it from the deluge of rhetoric from a divisive Presidential political campaign, in part disgust with the heavy-handed imposition on public K-12 of a bizarre version of reform.  In that hiatus some important changes have quietly started to occur in our K-12 environment.

One of the more material has been the growing grass roots protest of the orgy of standardized testing being rammed into public education, including its use in ersatz state grades for schools, holding back students, firing teachers, and even attempted destruction of public education in favor of increasingly questionable charters.  What seemed to be public education’s indolence and resignation, to being dumbed-down to alleged learning based on corporately-devised tests, has broken out into the open as some dissent, even from usually politically correct superintendents.

One teacher’s disgust, taking the issue to the mat, is illustrated in this story from The Washington Post’s, “The Answer Sheet,” edited by Valerie Strauss.  Few teachers are taking the challenge to this length, but below the surface stories abound about how good teaching in K-12 is being undermined by the alleged reform movement, VAM, and on the flip-side in many cases K-12 administration and boards that can only be labeled yellow-bellied cowardice.

But all of this warfare in the trenches, while it focuses the adversaries and the skirmishes, also succeeds in giving credence to an age-old idiom, “being able to see the forest for the trees.”  If there is a term that describes the last decade of attacks on public education – recently witlessly reflected in Anne Romney’s quote that, for a "proper education"...“we should totally throw out the [public education] system” – it is America’s educational myopia.

Major Contradictions

Backing away from those trees to try to scope the K-12 forest, a flood of contradictions in present reform scenarios over the last couple of years assaults the senses.  In no particular order:

• Charters are being billed as the key to improving US K-12, but except for a few such systems that are actually intelligent and well-managed, and would have been equally successful as public systems, charters have proven to both stimulate corrupt practices and produce learning near the bottom of the barrel.

• While spending some of his billions to manipulate to his vision of K-12, Bill Gates is on the record as stating that he doesn’t see more than roughly a tenth of K-12 schools ever being charters.  Huh?

• In uncharacteristic hypocrisy, President Obama consistently voices a message that K-12 reform has to go beyond testing to genuine changes that increase learning; but then hands the formulation of education policy to an Arne Duncan who has helped create the standardized testing overkill and choked off any real reform of public K-12, as well as decimated the legitimate research functions of the US Department of Education. 

• Our once very vocal teachers’ unions have suddenly gone silent and impotent in defending teachers who have been gored by the simplistic and ignorant application of VAM models to teacher performance and retention.  Self-service and -preservation apparently trump doing the job that justifies their retention?

• Not to be left off the list, public school systems that by chance are embedded in reactionary enclaves manage to avoid reality by teaching to the tests, avoiding transparency to their constituents, and simply continuing – frequently with more than a little arrogance – the same retro and ignorant educational practices they acquired in our challenged and equally retro schools of education.  Vying for stupidity, public K-12 education overall has simply let itself be raped by the corporate reform mantra.

• The alleged education reformers stridently call for “more data,” metric processes they generally fail to understand or frequently subvert; simultaneously, even the NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) gathers so little relevant data about America’s approximately 100,000 public school systems, that coupled with purposeful local system obfuscation, we know virtually nothing useful about the operations and real performance of most US public K-12 systems.

• Our states aggressively campaign for more local control of K-12, but as in Ohio, are generally either incompetently staffed to provide that oversight, or are riddled with corrupt and politically manipulated state-level K-12 functionaries.  Does the name Stan Heffner, Ohio's former Superintendent of Education, jog memory and an alarm klaxon?  School boards more incompetent than competent, and frequently dysfunctionally parochial, round out the local control challenges. 

• Our nation is now spending billions of dollars on tests developed in the back rooms of corporations, by resources of unknown provenance, who may have never seen the inside of a classroom from the front, or had the responsibility for a student, for tests that were never adequately tested before being mass distributed as public K-12 fiat.  Meanwhile, virtually no effort is being expended to develop K-12 performance measurements that could assess real learning and are driven by neural findings; perhaps the ultimate “missing the forest for the trees.”

• The demagogic play of a Wendy Kopp, “Teach for America,” essentially operates on the principle that the content of a degree in education can be encompassed in a few weeks of summer indoctrination of newly minted graduates, essentially bypassing all of US college/university work in education.  Not a peep has issued from our dyspeptic to moribund schools of education?  Paradoxically, this overkill is a direct response to public education’s historical (and hysterical) obsession with methods now regularly being invalidated by neural research, versus recruiting for subject matter excellence.

• The generic hope for a less myopic understanding of education by our nation rests with its media, especially the intelligent and factual day-to-day coverage of real K-12 philosophy and its challenges by the local press.  Unfortunately, for example in a place where education might be billed as its most important product, Bloomington, IN and home of Indiana University, its major newspaper can't understand or refuses to cover genuine learning issues, and generally is simply sycophant to the local system and in denial of its instances of dysfunction.

• Lastly, the drumbeat mantra of ideologically driven public education reformers, usually expressed in capital letters signifying shouting, spouts...LET THE MARKET DO IT.  As a professional student of markets and marketing for six decades, the suggestion is that these alleged market advocates are clueless about the actual behavior of markets in virtually any venue, with most of those mantras being akin to something out of a comic book.  Only in this decade have the explanatory components of behavioral economics started to provide some understanding of real market behavior and its complexities. 

The Forest

One could be forgiven if the sum of the above elicits either a sigh or curse.  What was once a stable national public education environment has been thrown into chaos by the above forces and contradictions.  There appear alternate trajectories for the venue:  Muddle through depending on what has been termed America’s “wisdom of the crowd,” the capacity for our grass roots to hang on to some common sense even when it’s missing at a state or national level; or severing the Gordian Knot of present reform and reforming the reform.

The former approach, that once worked, seems to have been impaired by decades of diminished excellence in that very public education system under attack.  Unfortunately, recognizing that our K-12 public education bureaucracy brought this grief on itself offers little in the way of solutions.  A strident example is the local system where this blog originates:  Ignorant administration; cheating; lame school board; misplaced priorities; indoctrination and mediocre curricula rather than excellence; lip service to needs such as STEM work, but adoption of mediocre content to achieve that; ignorance of contemporary learning; sports and physical plant overkill; even the possibility of being riddled with unethical practice; almost total opacity of what the system is inflicting on the community’s children because of paranoia about showing its pedagogy cards; and financial obfuscation and fraud in peddling levies.  The local popular response mirrors a national paradox; the other guy's system is flawed, but ours is just fine.

Looking at the other option, reform of reform, a visual analogy is imagining that forest with the trees upside down; the roots above, the branching buried.  That reform of reform would arguably need to fully reverse the present course.  Instead of starting with destroying teachers who ethically won’t make standardized tests the definition of knowledge or promote corrupt education (confirming Campbell's Law), start reform on top.

Reform with a vengeance our collegiate schools of education; increasing selectivity, requiring subject matter excellence, and introducing contemporary managerial theory and practice for would-be administrators.  Find Arne Duncan a new assignment, Bill Gates a new hobby, and Michelle Rhee some behavior modification therapy.  Reform how state departments of education choose their leadership.  Reform how a state board of education, for example Ohio’s politicized State Board, is selected, then require a legislature to give it some teeth to investigate and regulate K-12 system behaviors.  

Reform local school board selection by making it a properly functioning electoral process rather than a manipulated form of insider dealing.  Reform public education’s school leaderships by re-vetting and re-certifying its superintendents to some national managerial standards, terminating the losers, retraining the rest to install legitimate school leadership, and address creating a more contemporary model of school organization.  Give the classroom back to its teacher, with the authority to design and manage its activities to stimulate real learning rather than test scores.  Lastly, counter the usual simplistic criticism of reducing boilerplate testing by installing educational process control that mirrors modern industrial and technology practice, versus obsolete concepts of inspection, to minimize the mechanical need for testing to assess teachers and systems.  Restore the proper use of testing as a natural part of classroom assessment.

Preserving a healthy US educational forest versus chainsawing its trees is obviously not a chore for the fainthearted.  But the risk of not tackling that chore is being elevated by real science.  Relatively new to the study of societal change is “catastrophe theory.”  Not what you may think it is, the “catastrophe” referenced can be either a positive or negative function.  What the theory suggests, however, is that as a system approaches a tipping point small changes in that system can trigger both the tipping point and large systemic shifts.  The point is that the tacit assumption of the dug-in, that our nation’s public education system is too big to fail or flip, is highly flawed.

America hasn’t increased its attention span as evidenced by the current Presidential campaign, nor has its slogging in myopic thinking much changed.  It seems transparent that the wisdom of the crowd on education has dripped away, and that salvaging over a century of US public education development is going to take its key players stepping up to the plate with more courage, wisdom, and leadership than heretofore demonstrated since publication of "A Nation at Risk."   The alternative seems to be a “petrified public K-12 forest.”

SQUINTS 6/25/2012 – HIGHER EDUCATION ON THE CUSP

The original topic for this edition of SQUINTS was review of the proposals from the first (President Truman’s) presidential commission on higher education, circa 1947.  It seemed a relevant starting point for assessment of U.S. higher education, given that most of its recommendations have yet to find their way into collegiate reform by 2012.

Sixty-five years seems a rather long gestation period, even for the measured character of leadership of American higher education.  To add some angst to the picture, family and college student debt from the unchecked escalation of collegiate costs, coupled with states slashing public higher education support for decades, now exceeds one trillion dollars, and counting. 

Over the last several weeks the University of Virginia, famously founded by Thomas Jefferson, has been racked by controversy, stemming from the improperly executed action of a handful of board plotters to fire its president along with a ton of obfuscation of the reasons. 

This week, in a courageous, strategic and brilliantly conceived effort, not, to address the debt issue, Indiana University’s trustees voted to solve the problem by approving an educational program to increase student financial literacy.

The same board of IU geniuses also approved a new “school of philanthropy.”  Not articulated was the mission; there is likely a need for academic work on philanthropic process, on not-for-profit (NFP) and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and on their functions.  However, that work and research would appear better executed within existing collegiate work on organizations, finance, administration and marketing, than creation of still another school bureaucratic and overhead structure. This appears to be a constant symptom of the growth syndrome driving many universities, unchecked expansion along with overhead rather than creative use of organizational thinking to reduce burden.  Whatever, let’s hope a vaccine can be found for the condition.

The College Debt Issue

In a few months the student debt issue has escalated, in Congressional partisan squabbling about how to pay for keeping the interest rates on that debt (the principal now exceeding one trillion dollars) from doubling, and has finally started to penetrate the sheltered environs of university boards of trustees or visitors.

Yes, the business of higher education is allegedly education, when it can be interspersed with recreation and sports; so what’s the beef with IU’s quest for financial literacy for its students?  Aside from that educational effort being belated by a few decades, perhaps the question comes from the script of an old TV ad for fast food – “where’s the beef?”  Metaphorically, where is the beef, i.e., where is a strategic plan for higher education reform, for increasing classroom productivity, for cleaning the bureaucratic stables, for seeking sustainable cost reductions, and thereby reduction of tuition?  The notion of better educating students (and their families) to fully understand how they're being gored by a system out of control, while failing to address causes, stretches credibility?

Successive U.S. president’s commissions on higher education subsequent to Mr. Truman’s have made numerous suggestions for reducing the cost, and improving the productivity of U.S. higher education; virtually every proposal over a half century has been rejected by institutions increasingly independent of their original funding, in favor of growth as a goal and expanding functions well beyond the education mission.  That thrust in turn has in part at least been driven by the complexity of a university’s stake holders:  Faculty who can see themselves as independent contractors rather than employees, bargaining for higher salaries; alumni who respond to sports and glitz but shun educational achievement; expanded research roles that require far greater investment; faculty refusals to regularly reassess their curricula as a reality check; Federal mandates; management that frequently cannot decide just what its role is or aspires to emulate our corporate world and its salaries.

Generically, cost reduction in any complex organization also has a long history of strife – the other guy’s costs are always the ones to be reduced, resulting inevitably in conflict and gridlock in any system that cannot be operated traditionally based on command and control.  Universities, in existence for almost a millennium, have been a more complex organizational system than “businesses,” even our largest, and to succeed in their primary missions and venues have been managed differently than businesses.  Yet, the process of cost reduction itself can be highly disciplined and governed by strategic goals.  The writer lived one admittedly simple version of the challenge, but that had to be addressed in quick time.

The first company managed had a customer mix consisting of 80 percent businesses termed mom & pop operations, and 20 percent national chains.  The former bought small quantities of equipment and paid relatively higher average prices; the latter bought on annual contracts and paid far lower prices.   In the space of a few years the industry experienced a major shakeout, with national chains acquiring the smaller firms at an unprecedented rate.  Within two years, our firm’s mix of customers went from the prior 20/80 to 80/20 chain dominance.  With that shift, the average dollar revenue per unit of the equipment sold was virtually cut in half, though the unit volume increased.  Left untouched, the scenario had the potential of abruptly cutting the firm’s profits by more than 50 percent.  As a division of a Fortune 50 company, one’s tenure promised to be short-lived indeed if that trajectory was unchecked.

A solution, with the full engagement of a work force on the same page, was major cost reduction of the products’ and distribution costs via creative changes that maintained product quality and service delivery.  Essentially, every consequential line item on the product’s bill-of-materials was methodically and creatively rethought; necessary, materials, process, made versus vended, just-in-time sourcing, inspection versus process control, packaging, post-sale service and upgrades?  In a period of two years, as the average revenue per unit dropped, the percent (not absolute dollars) product margin was retained, while product appearance and function were actually enhanced.  Coupled with greater physical volume provided by the chains, the company’s dollar profits actually materially increased.  Critically, to achieve such cost change was a consuming full-court press in double-time; there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The questions are:  Are our universities objectively up to or can they even internalize that level of focus and effort; is the university model of organization compatible with that form of focused effort; is there, metaphorically, a higher education “bill-of-materials” that can addressed as in the simple example offered; paradoxically, though it is looked to for intellectual leadership, can higher education actually break with traditions and inertia to develop major creative solutions to improving learning and at lower cost?  I believe there are affirmative answers to those questions, but not without material change in higher education beliefs, a willingness to seek creativity, and accept some risks of demanding higher performance from both their student and faculty populations.

Where Risk Resides

The last few weeks have witnessed the unfolding, perhaps unraveling is more apropos, of a higher education soap opera, that if it wasn’t indicative of what is coming at higher education, would have offered enough intrigue and slapstick to offset summer TV reruns:  The sorry spectacle was of ignorant and secret plotting by a small cabal of the University of Virginia’s board of visitors (along with allegedly the support or instigation of a billionaire alumnus of UVA) to oust Dr. Teresa Sullivan, its president of just two years.  The basis of the coup was that Dr. Sullivan had allegedly not moved with enough aggression in two years in addressing escalating costs or alternative pedagogical methods applicable to higher education.

Below are seven citations that tell the University of Virginia story to date.  They will not be replayed here, but they are both an object lesson for would-be outside reformers, as well a warning bell that change in higher education is even more complex than in public K-12.  For a good example of how not to reform U.S. higher education, and worth your attention:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57459335-503544/how-the-new-yorkers-atul-gawande-caused-the-debacle-at-uva/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/us/university-of-virginia-board-considers-sullivan-replacement.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/education/university-of-virginia-vice-rector-and-a-prominent-professor-resign.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/university-of-virginia-students-feel-betrayed-after-ouster-of-teresa-sullivan/2012/06/22/gJQAU4aLvV_story.html?hpid=z3

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/question-in-u-va-tumult-what-should-premier-public-universities-be/2012/06/23/gJQA1o6qxV_print.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/u-va-prof-why-governing-board-gets-an-f-for-sullivan-project/2012/06/21/gJQAX9tksV_blog.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/u-va-the-irony-in-the-evidence-against-sullivan/2012/06/22/gJQA9rdTvV_blog.html#pagebreak

The UVA example has four major thrusts, three of which are generalized.  The issue particular to UVA is the failure of its board of visitors and the principal instigator of the coup to reflect any transparency or any sense of good management.  The UVA board’s methods violated literally every caveat of contemporary management of any organization regardless of its categorization.  Therefore, one general issue is whether reform of higher education, ala K-12, should take the course of corporate attacks on the establishment to force change, a risk of quickly becoming its motif?

The other issues that can be generalized to this discussion are what are viable and sustainable education cost reductions, what pedagogies and which rubrics work for improving learning productivity, and whether the processes to achieve either and the timetables should be set by external stake holders or set within the institutions?

The Gut U. S. Higher Education Challenges

For better or worse, the University of Virginia has become the camel’s nose in the Arab’s tent, to put the least onerous spin on that brouhaha.  That nose is, should corporate reform, and its conceptions of what parts and at what rates higher education processes can be changed, be the modality for reform of our colleges and universities?

The counter is, U.S. institutions of higher education have been in denial of need for change, along with public K-12 education, for most of the last half century, and some majority of their number has abandoned higher education first principles in favor of an expansionary, corporate form of organizational logic and goal setting.  The issue is that reform of higher education is far more complex than the same mission for K-12.

Reform challenges:

The complexity of the core institution; there is far more complexity in the operations, and diversity of forms of collegiate and university process.  A proposition, there is more disparity between our best collegiate work – the ivies and upscale techs – and our worst – too many of our so-called community colleges, high school 2 – than the best versus the bottom quartile of public K-12.

Most undergraduate higher education curricula are less obsolete than their public K-12 counterparts, but selectively fall short of being contemporary expressions of their genre’s science and art.  The sciences including neural biology fare best, followed by medicine, law and the humanities.  Schools of education in their present state of knowledge should likely be put out of their misery, or declared startups, and political science seems to have gone underground. 

Most of the nation’s overripe, overfunded, and overrated B-schools have never in a half century fully melded basic disciplines with business theory, moving from fad to fad, nor ever effectively reflected business practice at a high level and its ethical demands.  Current practices in too many corporations massaging greed like a mantra indicate the U.S. has reaped in the moral products of its B-schools what it sowed, and there has been only one major rethinking of its disciplines and curricula since WWII. That in turn had to be pounded into the B-schools by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations.  B-schools in other nations are now besting this American higher education creation.

The cost of four years of U.S. higher education in general exceeds the cost of 13 years of prior formal education process, and if current research is believed, those four years produce very little change in learning.  Paradoxically, public K-12 practices classroom instructional dogma with marginal knowledge content, while higher education steeps itself in assumed knowledge virtually thoughtless about how to optimally explicate it in the classroom.

U.S. higher education reflects an interesting paradox; its products – the alumni – exhibit remarkable, even exaggerated loyalty to places where they did baccalaureate work; but if truth be told, most of those institutions view most of those alums as semi-educated and with mild contempt, patronizing their institutional interests to solicit contributions and procure endowments.  In recent years, the better-managed and most contemporary divisions of most colleges and universities have been their alumni offices, the rainmakers.

Higher education faculties excepting the high end of the breed have become a fairly arrogant lot, assuming they can’t be replaced, willing to threaten administrations with relocation to extract higher salaries, many not perceiving themselves as employees, and possessing in general less loyalty to their institutions than many hourly employees exhibit to companies where stably employed.  Collegiate faculties have resisted for over a half century studying and learning how to teach.

Sports are exploited in public K-12 in a perverse fashion to smoke parents and divert their attention from education, but the collegiate sports mess beggars that misapplication, increasingly being the collegiate tail wagging the collegiate dog, generally corrupting it.

The former corruption is only matched or exceeded by the chase of endowment dollars from successful alumni with egos that exceed even their balance sheets.  This form of funding, hyped unceasingly, has become a form of university and academic foundation corruption that rivals the political super pac.  More dangerous, that link with donors has now fostered the “Gates effect,” breeding wealthy advocates of self-styled accelerated collegiate change but lacking the wits to even understand the system being attacked.

There are undoubtedly competent academic managers, but little agreement about how they should be prepared for the assignment or what those attributes are.  Increasingly, where the thirst for dollars has been stoked, many deans and program leaders have been selected because they are willing to roll the dice on their disciplines or are con artists rather than academic leaders.  In one article cited above, UVA’s Dr. Sullivan is described as the opposite, doing precisely the things generally associated with successful organizational management; somewhat bizarre then, being ousted for doing what good managers are supposed to do.

In another article cited above, higher education’s increasingly Achilles’ Heel, no pun intended, is the lack of preparedness of trustees and visitors to be the needed collegiate oversight, many appointed for purely political reasons rather than competence to materially effect collegiate strategic choices; e.g., the case of UVA, or IU, or Miami University another proximate example of the endowment addiction and misdirected spending, or practically every state institution of U.S. higher education.  The weakness doubles down on the tragedy usually represented by incompetent or self-interested K-12 school boards.

Lastly, the saying should be tattooed onto every fledgling trustee or visitor given the responsibility of high-level collegiate oversight – COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT BUSINESSES, NOR SIMPLY CREATURES OF TRADITIONAL MARKETS.  This may be hard for many of our so-called corporate reformers to grasp, even those who manifest good business management instincts and skills; it will never be grasped by many contemporarily who have substituted simplistic political ideologies about markets for awareness in 2012, just 76 years short of a millennium since the formation of the university concept.*

On the Cusp?

Political dysfunction in the U.S. has now forced onto our K-12 schools a reform agenda that lacks intellect, even common sense, and now is at the cusp of colliding with public higher education in the same fashion.  Both attacks were earned and are deserved by the inattention and hubris of their respective administrative universes in addressing their respective purposes and means, but the repercussions for American progress are dismal.  Higher education, because its institutions can’t easily get lost in a crowd of 100K entities all invoking local control, may be more vulnerable to misdirected change than public K-12.

The above views will elicit squeals of protest, but they come closer to the challenge of U.S. academic progress than the naïve assessments issuing from those institutions.  If there is any counterpoint, it is ironically that our colleges and universities are generally being guided by competent resources, who still command enough of the confidence of most of their stake holders to avoid the "reform" confrontations of public K-12. They could deflect externally dictated alleged reform long enough to launch the needed change processes from within.

Are they strategically smart enough, with the courage to use the opportunity?  Good question.

Footnote:  UVA's governing Board of Visitors, in an afternoon session on June 26, unanimously voted to reinstate Dr. Teresa Sullivan as President of the University of Virginia.  It remains to be seen whether on July 1 Virginia's Governor will reappoint to that Board its present rector, Helen Dragas, the alleged architect of the coup to oust Sullivan with something less than due process even in the corporate world.  Ms Dragas, a graduate of UVA's Darden graduate B-school, apparently took little awareness of managerial excellence away from that division, also alleged to be a focal point of the ouster attempt.

The issue, whether our nation's B-schools are currently the right source of a template for higher education reform, was briefly addressed earlier in this post.  Reaffirming the sentiments, our B-schools first need to clean up their own act before exporting present dogma to our universities as a whole. Clearly, the present cadre of alleged corporate-based reformers, and the naiveté they represent, should not be calling out either higher education's reform's strategies -- "dynamic" slogan or not -- or its tactics without being taken "back to school."

*The concept of the university is generally traced to the formation of the University of Bologna (Italy) in 1088.  Subsequently, the universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge were formed.  Harvard, for example, traces its founding to 1636.  Our public K-12 schools by contrast are mere toddlers.

SQUINTS 6/11/2012 -- FIFTY K-12 BLOGS LATER: AN EPILOGUE

This is a brief detour from a series about U.S. higher education; call it an epilogue to SQUINTS K-12 after a year and 50 blogs.  It was prompted by reflection stimulated after a brief retreat from the challenge of weekly K-12 posts, and by the confluence of a series of blog and article posts this week.

Precursors

The most effective media critic of the present maniacal path of public K-12 reform, arguably the genesis of a potential testing bubble mimicking our housing and financial debacles, has been The Washington Post, especially "The Answer Sheet" guided by WP's Valerie Strauss.  That feature has attracted posts by a blue-ribbon cadre of thoughtful educators, providing counterpoint to the propaganda machines being funded and manipulated by a Duncan, Gates, Rhee, Klein, Kopp, and sundry other players seemingly more highly motivated by self-promotion, or ideologies, or greed, than systemic K-12 awareness and true national need.

This week's “The Answer Sheet” produced four posts that capture some of the insanity of the present reform mentality.  They are linked as follows: Some candor about our students; the widening gyre; useless standardized tests; and why charters are not an answer.  Two more items came from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science, and publisher of the definitive U.S. science journal, Science), on the challenges in teaching in the U.S. both evolution and climate science; juxtaposed against frequent public commitment to ignorance, mythology and religious and other demagoguery.

Ideally, the above citations should be read before proceeding.  Rhetoric continues to swirl around this real life educational "game of thrones," but those with the lead seem impervious to reason, refusing even the objectivity to entertain content or an alternative view that conflicts with their rationalizations for actions.  Some practicing in the public K-12 venue jump to denial, refusing even the possibility of addressing issues that represent any risk from even acknowledgment.  Comparatively, for those who practice or have practiced at a high level in the private sector, and taken the risks that accompany accepting hard targets, plus change and creative strategies to meet them, public K-12 education's spineless or self-righteous retreat from invention or change explains though it may not justify the contempt evoked in the private sector. The issue is that contempt is motivationally driving present corporate reform initiatives and dollars harder than concern for America's future learning.

Ready or Not – Twenty Questions

If you've read the above links, the following questions will not be surprising. Whether any force or coalition will be capable of countering what psychologist Irving Janis pioneered as an explanation that fits the current K-12 reform mentality -- "groupthink" and its effects in present reform -- is another issue.

The questions:  

Why is K-12 "reform" in the U.S. now the province of a sub rosa army of right wing corporate advocates and lobbyists reflecting educational ignorance, drive for profits, or twisted ideology, or even managerial ignorance?  Is this a perceived vendetta owed public education because it is assumed to represent "liberal social views breeding Democrats?" (Parenthetically, a large swath of public K-12 is so retro and reactionary that our corporate raiders are in essence sacrificing their own kind.)

Why have America's teachers been targeted as the apex of alleged accountability, when genuine accountability, the 360 degree imperative, should start with public K-12 education bureaucrats and administrators, ranging from many poorly trained and self-centric through genuine sociopaths, all lacking effective board oversight?

Why have our teachers' unions suddenly turned into meek recluse, going to ground instead of being the source of countervailing power protecting what has become a discriminated and persecuted teacher minority?  (One may argue that America's teachers' unions bested even public K-12 in refusing to read the room, and know when to become a partner with K-12 reform rather than its enemy.  The current political caucus is calling for elimination of all public sector unions, on the heels of Wisconsin's recall outcome.  Sounds good to all the union-busters, but without the countervailing power of, in this case, teacher representation with teeth, the risk of teacher abuse and despotic organizational performance soars.  If not precisely that, what is the effect seen in dismissal of teachers with proven performance on the basis of a flawed VAM calculation?)

Why has Mr. Obama: One, joined forces with some of the worst of right wing ignorance and cynical profiteering to continue to hypocritically allow discredited standardized testing over better assessments; two, allowed public K-12 education to be turned into in effect a Federally promoted and funded corporate takeover using VAM to whack teachers; and three, now incongruously advocated hiring more teachers even while false assessment actions are diminishing their ranks and demotivating them, that hiring of necessity coming from schools of education he has by default neutered in praising TFA?

Who are the unnamed and invisible liberal ideologues inside the U.S. Department of Education or the White House, willing to entertain the devastating strategic learning consequences of present testing-based change, to pursue a utopian fantasy of perfect educational equity; and who is writing the software animating the USDOE’s robot, Arne Duncan, producing endless and hypocritical propaganda on cue?

Charters are demonstrating the failing consequences of privatizing K-12 universal education: Why, when even Bill Gates acknowledges that privatized charters may never exceed 10 percent of all K-12 schools, are profit–driven, unaccountable, and even corrupted tax-funded charters still being forced on our nation’s parents and children?

Why in America’s heartland, and especially in its non-urban places, are schools like Ohio’s New Bremen system, or even Bloomington, Indiana’s Monroe County Community School Corporation (spanning a Big Ten university community), still mired in last century’s retro thinking and bureaucratic organization, meekly accepting dysfunctional testing or cheating, in denial that public K-12 is under attack, projecting self-righteousness and even arrogance, and offering transparency metaphorically only “arrow slits in the battlements?"

Why has U.S. public K-12 education as an institution rested on its laurels, or to be less complimentary, sat on its hands wearing blinders for the last several decades, letting the core function of learning assessment be ripped away from education and given to the corporate sector, instead of recognizing the reform straws in the wind and broadly initiating self-reform? 

Why have America’s collegiate schools of education both settled back into the last century’s thinking and literally gone to ground, when their products are being attacked by corporate education testing drones and Teach for America?

Why has Wendy Kopp elected self-promotion and profit by demagogically using Teach for America, even making it a cult, rather than using alleged passion for learning to reform our collegiate schools of education instead of undercutting them; and why has Obama embraced and even applauded the systemic treachery?

Why has a Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Riverside, ETS, etc., been allowed to simply monopolize and commercialize for profit the creation and scoring of K-12 testing, and when there is evidence the corporate expertise for that measurement is flawed and its practices reflect ethical lapses?

Is the present K-12 reform trajectory another bubble, that will burst when it is finally discovered or revealed that present testing does not advance genuine learning that can be leveraged to do the nation’s work, and the effect is an even deeper structural U.S. unemployment crater; and how can a public system disemboweled again be made whole, and over what time horizon given the damage inflicted?

How many extant examples are there of competent research validating the learning effects of present standardized testing and the use of VAM to flog K-12 teachers?  (Too easy, none.)

How much research has been funded and methodically pursued to create better testing models for high order thinking and learning, to experiment with their performance, and to make the testing actionable at the school level?  (Also too easy, virtually none.)

How many K-12 administrators have had sufficient training in management, strategy, technology, leadership or ethics?  (Ditto above.)

How many schools have been nudged by fear or arrogance into cheating either subtly or egregiously, to try to escape slavish state punitive test repercussions, souring an education system once based on ethical precepts?

How many public K-12 administrators would be hired in the private sector and remain employed if held accountable for performance, and how many should have their ticket to practice lifted, or belong in the slammer?

How many state departments of education are manned by education’s best and brightest, exuding objectivity, ethics and independent of political sycophancy?  Hint:  An answer is an equation that starts with “50 minus Ohio, Indiana, Florida, etc., etc.”

How many corporate right wing ideologues can actually think strategically about education, recognize unintended consequences, and can define K-12 learning versus business functions and cranking out product; and to what extent do we owe this deep philosophical perspective in part to the increasingly defective performances of America’s collegiate B-schools?

Lastly, how many Duncans, Gates, Rhees, Kopps, Kleins, et al., does it take to undermine American K-12 public education?  This one’s bone-head easy:  “One each.”

The Twenty-First

Our national lexicon bristles with shards of the “21^st;” the century, the age of maturity, the twenty-one gun salute, the gaming table, the Twenty-First Amendment, so here’s a bonus twenty-first question:  

How has an alleged K-12 reform movement – pivoting on the historically developed concepts of intelligent performance measurement and accountability, steeped allegedly in the educational literacy of a national department of education and 50 state departments of such, and a corporate sector allegedly steeped in business theory and organizational performance expertise – managed to utterly and stupidly pervert both?

Accountability has a complex history of thought, and comes in a plethora of versions; vertical, horizontal, 360-degree, alignment with other precepts of organizational theory, and melded with sensible choreography of application in human organizations.  Testing has been ongoing since the Greeks, and likely long before, but attached to awareness and understanding of how any assessment of performance should serve to advance learning.  Even in the remains of the last century there was prescient work on learning measurement – along with advanced tools for administration – that should have set the course for improving its processes, rather than demonizing its most vulnerable recipients.  

Both elegant and hard won organization theory and performance concepts, and a half century of testing wisdom have been blatantly ignored, even venally repudiated by those advocating the prosecution, embarrassment, even denouement of public K-12 education to create liege to a fantasy of perfect markets and the alleged discipline of corporate control.  The ideology of the corporate reform hammer of K-12 is in fact manifest corporate ignorance and hubris; its mantra, that K-12 delivery of the processes that evoke learning and related accountability are monotonically equivalent to how business’ functions and utility are achieved, is just fundamentally wrong.  That tragic assumption is testimony that America’s education and accountability for business leadership has also come off the rails, and that realistic understanding of markets as the bases for resource allocation in an America that Adam Smith could not have imagined is equally or even more needy of insights than its public K-12 systems.

If an American K-12 public educational commons cannot stand in this republic, then America has truly devolved and set a course back to political and economic tribalism – let self-interest be the beacon, and the devil take the hindmost?  Is this to be America’s twenty-first century legacy to civilization, knowledge creation, and evolved social and economic intelligence?