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
) paints a similar picture, not about schools specifically, but the generally accepted business management model.
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.
May 23rd, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
N.Y. Times OpEd columnist Bob Herbert published a dandy on Saturday entitled “
Hard Roads Ahead” that echoes my own thoughts: be it ignorance, laziness, or a simple choice not to do the hard work in schools, we are failing a generation of kids. We are not adequately taking care of our future by solidly preparing students for the realities of the 21st century.
We can’t even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job. Someone please tell me how this is a good thing.
Herbert goes on the quote a passage from “Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation” by Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education:
“International comparisons rank the United States a stunningly unimpressive eighteenth for high school graduation rates, a lackluster ranking of fifteenth for high school reading assessments among 15-year-olds in developed countries, and an embarrassing 25th for high school math.”
And Wise believes that ”… America’s high schools are for the most part obsolete, inherently ill equipped to meet the needs of 21st-century students. The system needs to be remade, reinvented.” (Italics mine to emphasize that if the institution if obsolete, there is no reform, only creating something new. It may be a colossal waste of energy to “reform” rather than “create”.)
I’m flummoxed! I simply can’t understand (or accept) our unwillingness to engage in the excitement of creating a wonderful new learning environment. We’ve got an astonishing array of new, powerful learning tools right in front of us, making learning easier and more available and convenient than ever. I guess Deming is right: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” What do you think?
Next post: see how Pat Dolan accurately analyzes the old “system”.
May 19th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized, reform | No Comments
I was struck today by 3 separate pieces in the ASCD SmartBrief related to my last two posts and the front page of the site. School systems vigorously resist change despite the energy of well-intentioned people. These articles represent the same old pap we’ve done for such a long time—chase our tails (or run on the hamster wheel) wasting time (a scarce and unrenewable resource for educators), creativity, and hope on such insolence. Take, for example, Research questions the value of graduation tests. I doubt that this is the first first time this has been researched and I doubt that it will be the last. AND WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? We are losing tons of kids and staff and our world-class learning and we damn well better get beyond this idiocy and begin thinking beyond the school and the system. The problem with reform is that we are working on a dead model that will not change (as evidenced by these articles) so we need to forget reform and invent something brand new based on new assumptions.
My god almighty I think this question has been studied ad infinitum (et nauseam) for at least the 40 or so years I’ve been around education: Are social promotions the best answer for struggling students?. Aren’t there any new, more profound questions we can ask instead of this thread-bare question? How about this one: how can we make schools hospitable for learners? Or this one: how could we take the money that supports the “education system” now and channel it differently? How about this: what is it we want to create that brings joy, excitement, and life into learning?
I know I haven’t summarized Dolan’s work yet as I said I would, but one of the points he makes is that the education system as it now is is unable to learn from itself. So this appears and I think isn’t this what happened to the various merit pay schemes? And in how many other districts is this an issue? S.C. district ends bonuses for nationally certified teachers. So much for rewarding professionals or for providing an incentive for board certification and the system helping build a profession.
Finally, the sad truth about how the society supports (not) schools and learning. Minnesota district to shorten school week to make ends meet. This, too, is a perennial problem that we have chosen to ignore. What kind of a system could we create to keep schools from this kind of drought? How could we insulate schools more from the mountains and valleys that we experience every year? How can you build any enterprise if it always in crisis?
I am amazed continually by our lack of courage, inventiveness, and the good ol’ American spirit with regard to doing what we know is in our national interest: preparing intelligent, articulate citizens for our democratic society.
Tomorrow: Dolan and a look at the system.
May 15th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
I spent some time this weekend reading Clay Shirkey’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. While the book is not directly related to education or schools, it is a cogent analysis of organizations in times of dynamic change. I was struck by the similarity of the content to some reading I did in the last century. More about Pat Dolan’s Restructuring Our Schools: A Primer on Systemic Change
(1994). I want to go back even further to 1990 when Seymour Sarason published The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform
. The reason that all three of these books are important is that it appears to me that we are stuck on some giant hamster wheel, moving something with great energy while the wheel and hamster stay in the same place.
Sarason makes a number of key points summarized here.
- Schools have been intractable to change and the attainment of goals set by reformers. A major failure has been the inability of reformers to confront this intractability.
- Change will not occur unless there is an alteration of power relationships among those in the system and within the classrooms.
- The assumption that schools exist primarily for the growth and development of children is flat out wrong. That assumption is invalid because teachers cannot create and sustain the conditions for the productive development of children if those conditions do not exists for teachers.
- There is an unbridgeable gulf that students perceive between the world of the school and the world outside of it. Schools are uninteresting places in which the interests and questions of children have no relevance to what they are required to learn in the classroom.
I think he has it right and the failure of reforms before his writing and after helps explain the giant hamster wheel and why we haven’t moved a bit.
What’s missing from the school reform ideas is systems thinking and analysis. Unless and until we focus some of our thinking on the tough issues raised by Sarason (and many others) and look more deeply and thoughtfully at the education system we’ll continue to exhaust ourselves on the wheel with one “reform” after another. It’s hard and agonizing work—so far we’ve chosen not to engage. And I’m not sure that if we have the courage or desire to do that difficult work. If we dealt with Sarason’s ideas I’m not convinced we’d retain “school” as a way of learning, especially now.
Menken: for any problem there is a simple, direct answer that is wrong.
May 13th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
Fundamentally, education, schools and learning need to be rethought on a whole different level than we are on. Most of the proposals and theories to make schools better assume schools as they are: 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., September to late May or June, classes of 30-40 students of the same age in a “classroom” for about an hour (in some cases 85 minutes), frequent tests of the students’ knowledge of mandated curricula, subjects taught discreetly as if they are unrelated to one another in real life, proms, sports teams, hierarchical (supt., assistant supts., principals, assistant principals, etc.), top-down management system that is mechanical in nature, run by elected boards of education, students with little or no voice in school affairs, etc. The features of the system are remarkably the same across the roughly 14,000 school districts in the U.S. And the Canadian system, from what I’ve read, isn’t a whole lot different. This is one way to do learning.
For some students, the system works well. But not for all by a long shot. What we need to consider is that school as we know it needs changing. What might we consider?
- learning studios instead of classrooms;
- service learning for an extended period of time;
- thematic learning;
- eliminate the distinction between teacher and student;
- an IEP for every student with frequent conversations with adults;
- schools open more: from 7 am till 9 pm, 6 days a week, 250 days a year;
- many different kinds of school with many kinds of curricula;
- return to the arts—music, painting, drawing, poetry, dance, improv.
I’d like to hear what you think so drop a line.
April 29th, 2008 | Posted in Uncategorized, educational reform | No Comments
