A generous helping hand, then back to reality: intractable schools
I’m getting into the swing of this blog thing! And like lots of writers I get stuck sometimes and brood for days over what the next steps are. So a special thanks to Kate Olson over at KateSays, designer and consultant, for nudging me to this post.
As I’ve mentioned before, Pat Dolan wrote one of the most eye-opening books about reform and restructuring I’ve ever read: Restructuring Our Schools: A Primer on Systemic Change. It’s a simple, straight-forward read that analyzed our educational system. While it was published in 1994, I believe it accurately describes the our system today. He characterizes it as:
- Using a mechanistic rather than an organic metaphor;
- Being top down, strongly authoritarian, in tight control of information, a deeply layered pyramid “riddled with vertical and horizontal “silos” whose work habits are based in power rather than teaming or collaboration;
- Relying on short term, quantitative goals.
He concludes that those at the bottom exist in a state of no information, no power, having very little respect and feelings of disenfranchisement and impotency. The morale of the “troops” cannot sustain energy, talent and commitment of those who stay to work in the environment. And this book was written well after the 1983 A Nation At Risk and at the infancy of the world wide web.
The reason I find his description so compelling (other than he writes clearly and his views resonated like a solidly struck large, low-tone Tibetan bell with me and other educators) is that when I talk to teachers and some administrators today, the basic organization remains unchanged despite the valiant and promethean efforts of many educators. And Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
The typical organization is hierarchical, with workers answering to a manager, and that manager answering to a still-higher manager, and so on. The value of such hierarchies is obvious-it vastly simplifies communication among the employees. New employees need only one connection, to their boss, to get started. That’s much simpler than trying to have everyone talk to everyone. p.29
If you have ever wondered why so much of what workers in large organizations know is shielded from the CEO and vice versa, wonder no longer: the idea of limiting communications, so that they flow only from one layer of the hierarchy to the next, was part of the very design of the system at the dawn of managerial culture. p.42
Anyone who has worked in an organization with more than a dozen employees recognizes institutional costs. Anytime you are faced with too many meetings, too much paperwork, or too many layers of approval …, you are dealing with those costs. Until recently, such costs have been little more than the stuff of water-cooler grumbling–everyone complains about institutional overhead, without much hope of changing things. In that world (the world we lived in until recently), if you wanted to take on a task of any significance, managerial oversight was just one of the costs of doing business. p.44-45
The organization—how we organize and structure our efforts and work—is so 19th century. It simply cannot meet today’s challenges or take advantage of all the new and powerful tools available cheaply. We need to create something entirely new.
In coming posts, from time to time, I’ll indicate what changes need to be made, not unlike what Dolan did in the rest of his book. But I’m afraid we’ve moved way past Dolan’s solutions and we need fundamental reappraisals of our most basic assumptions about school, the education system, and learning.
Be well and drop a line or two telling me what you think.