Archive for the ‘educational reform’ category

Remove the Ceiling and Raise the Floor: Why Localities Should Have More Authority Over Federal and State Testing

July 10th, 2011

The following Commentary appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on July 10, 2011 at:

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/commentary/2011/jul/10/tdcomm01-taking-the-test-educational-opportunities-ar-1161193/

Author Harley Miles is the vice-chair of the Albemarle County School Board.

By HARLEY L. MILES

Taking the test: Local decisions boost opportunity

“On May 18, several superintendents and school board members representing a group of five school divisions met with the Virginia Board of Education’s Accountability Committee to request a waiver to pilot early Standards of Learning (SOL) testing in the middle-school grades.Collectively, this group of superintendents leads more than 30 percent of our commonwealth’s schoolchildren, and they represent some of the highest-performing school divisions in the state. (Albemarle, Fairfax County, Henrico, Virginia Beach and Roanoke County are the five school divisions.)

The superintendents and respective school boards are concerned that today’s students spend too much time focused on a single high-stakes test created by distant state officials and not enough time learning the skills colleges and employers are begging graduates to possess.The superintendents came before the committee to ask for permission to administer middle school reading and/or mathematics SOL tests at the end of the first semester as well as the current end-of-year SOL test administration.

Mid-year SOL testing would become a mastery filter and diagnostic tool. Students who demonstrate grade-level mastery at mid-year would be excused from taking the SOL tests at the end of the school year. Students who do not demonstrate mastery of the grade-level standards during mid-year testing would have the opportunity to re-test at the end of the school year.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Patricia Wright expressed much trepidation about such a request and approach. We are at a loss to understand her misgivings.

Imagine the freedom both students and teachers would have if the SOL test could be given mid-year.

Bubble Tests

Those students who demonstrate proficiency no longer have the specter of the SOL over their heads and are free to experience more rigorous, engaging learning that is tied to other standards — such as those measuring lifelong learning or college/workforce readiness — or to explore topics in depth, free from pacing guides designed to “cover” content in preparation for the SOLs.

Also, imagine the relief that students who do not demonstrate mastery at mid-year will have. Their instruction will be individualized for the students they are — free from repetition of concepts they have already mastered and full of opportunities to improve in those areas where growth is still needed.
They will approach the test with more measures of confidence in their preparation and with the additional opportunity to experience instruction that is more broad, holistic and not merely tied to “covering” a standard.

This waiver request is a basic recognition that we are accountable to and for children, and not merely standards. It understands that children learn at different rates and allows flexibility to ensure each child meets the standard, but through educational opportunities that recognize them as individuals with differing skills and needs.

To hold a student hostage in a classroom continuing to remediate or to remove a struggling student from enriched learning in order to continue test preparation does a disservice to both students.

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) will argue that SOLs are a measure of rigor and that engaging instruction can and should be conducted daily, as preparation for the SOLs.

But teachers, parents and students know better. They know SOLs are one kind of assessment, a multiple-choice test, which measures mostly fact recall and some application of information. They are neither engaging nor relevant. To advocate that SOLs are a comprehensive educational experience — or that they demonstrate a level of rigor in instruction, learning or assessment — is disingenuous.

We must ask ourselves why is it so important to the state that all students take the same test on the same day or week at the end of the year?

Being exempt from a course or requirement by showing existing proficiency is a common practice in higher education and the workplace. Businesses and colleges do not feel it is a good use of employee/student time to sit through a class when one already knows what will be taught.

What is the fear that Dr. Wright has in allowing our middle schools to merely do what countless universities and organizations do every day? Why so entrenched in process, in bureaucracy?

The request of these five superintendents and school board members is a threat because early proficiency of students would relegate the state scorecard to a minor hurdle one has to jump over, rather than the focus of instructional conversations across the state.

The role of SOLs and the VDOE would diminish; control of the conversation and the learning would shift. It appears that Dr. Wright and the VDOE are concerned about protecting the bureaucratic structures they have built and are vested in, as opposed to being concerned about the purpose of assessment or the needs of students. The requested waiver and pilot may present a positive step in the evolution of the state assessment program. We won’t know for certain unless we give it a try.

We ask Dr. Wright to reconsider her position of not supporting the waiver. We certainly hope the Board of Education will grant the waiver and monitor the pilot’s implementation process and progress. It’s been said, “It is better to try than to wonder.” ”

Harley L. Miles is vice chair of the Albemarle County School Board.

For a further glimpse into why superintendents are trying to increase emphasis on deep, rigorous learning opportunities for students and decrease focus on “test-prep” learning, read Yong Zhao’s post:

Can you be globally competitive by closing your doors and raising test scores?

http://zhaolearning.com/2011/05/13/can-you-be-globally-competitive-by-closing-your-doors-and-raising-test-scores/

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Posted in Accountability, assessment, Authentic engagement, Curriculum, Differentiated Instruction, Education Reform, educational reform, Governor's Race, High Stakes Assessments, institution constraints, instructional time, k-12 education, NCLB, ROI, SOL, Teacher Accountability, Testing, Uncategorized, Virginia

Tags: Albemarle Schools Fairfax schools Henrico Schools SOL SOL testing VADOE Virginia Beach Schools

Natural Leadership: the Power of We

May 16th, 2011

The opportunity to learn from a successful leader is worth its weight in gold. This past week, a team of educators with whom I work had a chance to visit a learning space that represents the impact of change agency within a large system.

Dr. Canterbury

After discussing what we would see in new learning spaces, we participated as a team in instructional “rounds” with a key leader in medical education to discuss innovations in the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia. Dr. Randy Canterbury serves as Associate Dean for Medical Education and he’s had direct responsibility for leading significant changes that, in essence, transformed the University’s medical education curriculum, pedagogy, learning resources, assessments, student work, and learning spaces. Teams of medical educators worked with him in designing new foundations for learning that transform the nature of medical education. They used a focus on Scientific Teaching (Jo Handelsman et al.) to inform research-driven decisions to make changes in educational practices and learning spaces. This work happened in a relatively “brief history of time.”

If you would like to learn more about the transformative work that’s occurred, I’ve written about specific changes in the School of Medicine at the Cooperative Catalyst and A Space for Learning. However, this post reflects upon leadership within the change process and what Dr. Canterbury describes as important for leaders to consider when making changes of significant magnitude in the work that occurs inside an organization. Here’s his perspective on change agency.

Be respectful of people. A respectful learning environment is an absolute necessity for success. All people need to respect all people, students, faculty, peer to peer, across the hierarchy.

Don’t be one who uses the words “I and me” a lot. “We and ours” are much more important because those bring us together. Little things like that become very important when working with colleagues.

You must have the ability to smile and wave, and continue to push. Be empathic and listen to people and their concerns. You must listen to naysayers – and in big changes you’ll find plenty of them. Validate their concerns without being steered off course.

Begin with Steven Covey’s “end in mind” and decide where you’re going and continue along that path. If you have moves from side to side in direction it should be because there’s a reason to move that way.

You’ll find hundreds of research studies on change process. There seems to be two types of change when it comes to ways you can change a big system. One is a gradual and transitional change in which you move things a little bit at a time and eventually you can get there, but it’s asymptotic. This doesn’t work so well in large systems. The other is a disruptive or transformational change that occurs with agility. When faced with the need to make radical changes, moving quickly gets ahead of resisters.

When you tear everything down you will get resistance from people whose work has occurred in the same way for decades or even a hundred years. This kind of change is distressing to people. People needed to hear “we really do need you. We need your expertise, but we’re reconfiguring and we want you to play with us, be a part of the team, and help us do this.”

Leadership support for change is essential “from the top.” Responsibility “from the top” also is critical. That means if a key team member doesn’t make the needed transition, the leader owns that. At the same time, the message must be that nobody is important enough to stop the team from making changes they need to make. Have backup systems for how you will get the work done. No one can hold you hostage then.

Tear down silos and get people working in teams. But, remember silos love to form. It’s amazing to see one of those things sitting out in a field someplace. You think that must have taken a lot of work to build those silos, but then they just drop out of the sky and there they are. You have to keep fighting against silos getting built.

Dr. Canterbury illustrates qualities of natural leadership in the work he has led to transform the last 100 years of medical education into 21^st century learning to “create physicians who serve patients well.” He realizes that change occurs best when a leader can relate with and to people he or she serves.

Natural leaders create compelling stories of why change is critical and those stories weave together observations, study, discussion, and data. Stories become a teaching tool that pulls people into the process of determining why change is needed, what’s possible, and how the community will work together to make changes together.

Natural leaders such as Dr. Canterbury engage community members in the change process by working across the hierarchy to gain people’s investment in the change, ensuring those in both positions of formal and informal leadership help facilitate the process. They care for community members throughout the change process, even those who resist change. Key to their success, natural leaders do not give up in the face of resistance, but rather work to ensure that resisters can’t hold the community “hostage” by creating barriers to change.

Learning Studio

In the School of Medicine, innovations didn’t occur as a result of a drawn out series of plans for incremental change. Rather, leaders used information to create dissonance about success of past practices that had been educational program traditions since Abraham Flexner brought structure to medical education. From this, the decision emerged to create disruptive innovation, literally and figuratively tearing down medical school walls. The success of these changes resulted from Dr. Canterbury’s work across the hierarchy to build ownership for the needed changes.

Natural leadership skills trump those of the scientific manager when it comes to leading for transformative change. Natural leadership skills predate the shift to scientific management advanced by Tyler in manufacturing and Cubberley in education.

There’s a place for elements of scientific management in the work we accomplish as leaders. However, I’ve come to believe that we need to learn from natural leaders and use what we learn to create a new curriculum of leadership that draws upon the knowledge and skills of those who lead naturally.

Dr. Canterbury attributes the medical school’s story of change to the power of a team of “we.” That’s an essential quality of natural leadership.

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Posted in 21st century skills, administration, assessment, Authentic engagement, Authentic learning, Collaboration, critical thinking, cross-disciplinary thinking, Curriculum, disruption, educational reform, focus, How People Learn, Leadership, multi-disciplinary thinking, Pedagogy, Professional Development, SOL, Sphere of Influence, Uncategorized, YES

Tags: Abraham Flexner change agency Covey Randy Canterbury UVA medical school

The “K” Playbook: Professional Learning for a Lifetime*

April 5th, 2011

dancing-house-prague(google image)

A mentor once said to me that he had never seen a kindergartner arrive at school with the idea that he or she was not a learner. During my professional years spent as an elementary principal, I cherished the opportunity to “kid-watch” kindergartners on a daily basis. The block area served as a favorite space of the kindergartners- and me. Here the fantastical imaginations and risky behaviors of five-year olds led them to design and construct post-modern expressionist structures reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s most interesting work.

I learned kindergartners aren’t afraid to explore the intersection of disparate materials that leads them to create whimsical, sometimes even absurd architectural spaces – towers, homes, castles, even whole cities- combining Legos, wooden blocks, aluminum foil, cardboard- whatever they could find in the kindergarten co-laboratory. Turned loose, kindergartners epitomize the dispositions of lifelong learning. They are adaptable, flexible thinkers who will play in the sandbox for hours, despite their short attention span in circle time. They love math and science and writing and painting and music and mythical stories and non-fiction information and chasing each other and dancing- all in the name of learning.

Tower Building

Taking a page from the kindergarten playbook, I wrestle with how we can grow the passion for learning inherent in kindergartners in our own work as educators. What it means to educate and be educated takes on new meaning in today’s technology-driven world. The task of educating young people who will graduate from our high schools with the capability to add value to our communities and workforce presents a challenge unique to these times. Our country’s very economic survival depends upon our educational community doing its best work ever in the history of public education.

We educators have watched Shift Happens (Mcleod and Fisch) on YouTube, read Tom Friedman’s the World is Flat, and listened to Tony Wagner push us to not just focus upon the national achievement gap but also the global one. Yet, the momentum necessary to make necessary changes never quite gets us off the ground. In fact, as Larry Cuban noted in 1992 in the article, “Computers Meet Classroom. Classroom Wins”, reforms do not change schools, but rather schools change reforms and, in such a way that little change ever occurs in schools.

A lifelong quest as an educator has been to figure out why we educators are less likely to change, indeed to incorporate new learning into our work, than almost any other field. I have come to believe that the potential for“deep change” in which knowledge, practices and processes shift is a function of the availability of substantial time for our own adult learning- something that is in little supply in America’s Pk-12 schools.

We educators have little time to play in the sandbox; to explore the intersections of disparate ideas, disciplines, and cultures that would lead us to create, design, and invent the curricula, assessments and instruction necessary to provide learning sustenance to contemporary learners. Instead, teachers work long hours during a 200 day school year, using what daily planning time is available to accomplish clerical and administrative tasks related to operational details of the job. Little to no time exists for a typical Pk-12 educator to read, think, reflect, collaborate, write, study, listen, converse, create, problem-solve; indeed, simply learn. This situation is inconsistent with other professions in this country and with the professional life of educators who work in high performing educational communities around the world.

I have come to the distinctly simplistic perspective that our educators need more unencumbered professional time dedicated to learning and that if they had access to such time, education would be transformative for learners and learning. However, expecting educators to acquire and use skills and then assimilate rapidly shifting technologies into their work with students, means coming to terms with the fact that integration of new technologies, new pedagogies, and new content demands far more time than our teaching educators are obligated to work in traditional contracts and on traditional calendars which do not serve us well in the twenty-first century.

Time to work together

On the other hand, some aspects of educating young people well in today’s world aren’t a lot different than 10,000 years ago. I suspect the best tribal teachers knew the value of team learning, hands-on approaches, practice, coaching and high levels of Bloom’s. For early Homo sapiens, teaching well surely meant the difference between the life and death of a tribe’s young people. Our earliest teachers knew that neither they nor their pupils could afford to rest as learners, but rather that they all had to constantly adapt and flex as they acquired new knowledge and skills essential to survival. Tony Wagner describes the skills that teenagers need in this century’s colleges, workforce, and communities as survival skills, too. These skills include Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence, Agility and Adaptability, Initiative and Entrepreneurship, Effective Oral and Written Communication, Accessing and Analyzing Information, and Curiosity and Imagination.

Opportunities to develop and use Wagner’s skills don’t typically emerge as a result of traditional curricula, instruction or assessments used in most of America’s public schools. If Tyack and Cuban are correct, not much will change as a result of any of our ghosts of reform – past, present or future. So what will it take to drive home the deep change needed so that our digital learners get the learning spaces they need today? And, if educators have little opportunity to engage in and assimilate new professional learning, why would they not remain closed and resistant to change?

Lifelong learning is essential to practitioners in the field of education. We must provide time for our teachers to continue learning if we expect them to embrace meaningful and necessary changes to transform schools of our past into schools for the future. This means providing significant time to try out new strategies and tools, to build relationships with each other as learners, and find the value inherent in participating in both virtual and face-to-face learning communities.

Time should not be either a luxury or an excuse for educators to do the hard work and play essential to their own learning. Just as in kindergarten, creative and inventive ideas in the block area or sandbox come with the time to think, to collaborate, to try out different construction materials and strategies, to analyze, and decide what to do next. Expert kindergarten teachers purposefully schedule the time needed for young children to do the messy work of learning. School calendars and contracts that reflect the time needed for educators to engage in their own learning work are a must. The biggest challenge is finding the funding, and, even more important and scarce, the will to make the necessary changes in structures leftover from the agrarian and industrial ages of public education. Perhaps, if our communities and educators believed our survival depended upon it, change would happen tomorrow.

*I first composed this piece 12/09 and never posted it until #edchat reminded of it tonight.

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Posted in assessment, Authentic learning, Big Idea, Bloom's Taxonomy, Coaching, Collaboration, Creativity, critical thinking, cross-disciplinary thinking, Curriculum, disruption, educational reform, Harvard Graduate School of Education, imagination, Innovation, interdisciplinary thinking, Pam Moran, Pedagogy, Relevance, School Community, teaching, Tony Wagner, Uncategorized

Tags: David Tyack Did You Know Frank Gehry karl fisch Larry Cuban lifelong learning scott mcleod

THE BANALITY OF INDIFFERENCE

October 4th, 2010

On Sunday, October 17 and Monday, November 22, grassroots turnaround leaders – educators who lead from the classroom, the principal’s office, the superintendent’s chair, higher education places, and activists’ spaces- will come together to continue to tip the nation’s public education conversation in a different direction than its current state. Make a commitment to join with your educational community colleagues on those days to blog, tweet, and post your thoughts and stories of real new forms of educating- the changes we need to ensure the viability of public education now and into the future. Our nation’s democratic way of life and its economic future depend upon it.

A female executive from a global technology corporation recently shared a story with a group of American teenage girls about a small school in Kenya that serves the most-disadvantaged girls imaginable. The executive spoke softly and eloquently about the intense effort of the Kenyan girls to learn everything they could from print materials that would be quickly tossed aside as unusable in one of our American schools. She said to the American teenagers that they should count every day their good fortune to attend a school with all of its advantages here in America. I’m not sure the young women really understood the story. I’m not sure they can. Americans don’t seem to be hungry learners – not adults, not children.

I don’t think tough issues faced by America’s public schools can be attributed to a lack of heroes in our classrooms. These issues certainly don’t exist because our kids are less intelligent than those in Finland, China, Ireland, or South Korea. And while money is important, the lack of it probably isn’t a root cause of many critical concerns either. After looking at some recent data sources, I wonder if today’s citizens are simply indifferent to learning. After all, there’s a big difference between talking the talk of a personal value for education and walking that walk in how we live a life of learning, or not.

In allocating our paychecks to what’s important to us, we spend annually about half as much on alcoholic beverages (.9%) and not quite 3 times as much on entertainment (almost 5.5%) as we spend on education (1.9%.) We’ve never really used the television as a learning technology as have the UK and many other countries that invest significantly in national educational broadcasting services compared to the U.S. We are not a nation of readers either. In that same paycheck survey, we only spent about .2% of our income on books and 25% of Americans who were surveyed in 2007 reported they did not read a book at all that year. Not one. And, despite the digital devices at their fingertips, 27% of Americans under age 30 accessed no news “yesterday” according to a recent Pew Study. Zero news. Zip.

However, perhaps the most disturbing statistic brought to my attention recently is based on Brookings Institution research. For the first time, the youngest generation of adult citizens in America will attain less education than older generations. This comes at a time when we hear daily that we need more college graduates- knowledge workers- than ever in our history, and we are falling behind the rest of the world. We need to turn around the falling educational attainment rate and make sure all young people can access the highest levels of learning possible including post-secondary learning options. That’s a critical economic vitality problem, too. After all, the best job market for America’s new college graduates today is everywhere else in the world but here.

Strategic planners say that how you spend money and time reflects your core values; you put your money behind what you believe is important to you. We Americans put a lot of value on cars and television. We also put a lot of time into weight loss, despite spending more time than ever on the couch watching television.

 in 2008, Americans owned 2.28 cars per household
 In 2009, Nielson reported an average of 2.24 TVs per household.
 We spend about $42 billion annually on weight loss programs and products.

We also allocate less as a government on education, percentage-wise, than on the military or health care – even in comparison to our geographic neighbor, Mexico.

If public education eventually does fail in America, I am convinced it won’t happen because of children who can’t or won’t learn. It won’t be because of the many dedicated educators in classrooms who have given up lucrative careers they could have pursued in other professions. Instead, I think it will be because of the banality of indifference * among many of today’s citizens to the importance of education, to a value for lifelong learning, and to a commitment to ensuring that the resources necessary to bridge social and cognitive capital are in place for all. I hope we’ve not lost the drive to become educated, but it sure feels as if we’re on our way to becoming a nation that takes education for granted- along with our cars, cartoons, and couches.

Despite media hype to the contrary, I still believe we sustain one of the best public educational systems in the world but I am worried about its future. I fear we are spending a lot of time focused on problems that aren’t the root causes of a national indifference to learning. Why are learners indifferent in some classrooms across America, regardless of socio-economic class, color, or capability of school success? Why do we profess to care about education; yet put our money everyplace but? What can we do to turn around indifference? Do we have the will to do those things? I’m not sure we have what it takes. But, I’m pretty sure it won’t happen if we give away the dialogue to people who care more about material goods than material learning; in politicizing education more than educating young people; and in making money from public school budgets more than investing money in our young people’s future.

October 17. November 22. Be present. Make a difference.

*Hannah Arendt, political theorist, first coined the controversial phrase “banality of evil” in reference to her observations and analysis of Adolph Eichmann on trial. I have used the phrase banality of indifference in this post after reflecting upon her perspectives.

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Posted in educational reform, narrative, Uncategorized

Emerging Trend: Superman Snubs the Justice League, Lex Laughs to the Bank

September 18th, 2010

NBC’s Education Nation confirmed their list of panelists for the upcoming education summit – none of whom are teachers and all of whom seem to take snaps from the same ed reform playbook. All except for the lone Randi Weingarten. She will play the role of Dissenting Voice in an ed reform narrative that is being ballyhooed across the nation. (Except where it’s not.)

It was important for event organizers to give Randi a place on the panel. The basic ed reform thesis, chronicled in the upcoming “Waiting for Superman,” begins with the idea that the school system & schools are broken, and that unionized teachers are where the faulty rubber meets the road. The trouble is, if the powers-that-be were to directly cast teachers as Lex Luthor their plan might backfire.

Who’s willing to place the failure of the American Education System on little old Mrs. Newton, teaching 2nd grade to generations of tots that loved her? That won’t sell well or bring in votes.

Enter unions stage left. Randi, as president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been a vocal critic of NCLB, RTTT, & the Fire-(Teachers)-At-Will squad of trigger happy reformers. As a teacher representative, she’s become the de facto Lightning Rod in the plot line that pits unions (as antagonists) against the great teachers the ed reformers (as protagonists) would deliver if only meddling teacher advocates would step aside.

For the NBC organizers, she needs to be a panelist in order to give the Gates’ League the whipping boy (girl) it requires.

The story goes like this: the unions enable the hordes of bad teachers who are responsible for keeping students from achieving. All the while the benevolent market forces of goodness & quality do their darnedest to right this wrong through superhero feats of privatizing, hiring & firing, and incentivizing teaching to the tests.

We are asked to buy into this plot-line and then jump to reformers’ same conclusions. Effectively, we are asked to leap these tall buildings, each in a single bound of reasoning:

If we weigh the cattle more often, they’ll get fatter.
Non-union teachers teach better.
Charter schools = silver bullet against poverty & lack of parent involvement.
Merit pay will be enough improve teacher “performance”. (A recent Vanderbilt study concludes otherwise.)

These unproven assumptions need more than super breath to blow me over. I’m just not convinced that these measures will lead to more professional educators & greater access to quality learning environments for all students.

The Bottom Line Variable

But what if they are wrong?

What if the fear mongering and hyperbolized “broken” metaphors that the media outlets have bought-into & hyped are the machinations of private stakes and bottom lines, rather than deep insights into poverty, parenting & learning? (That’s not to say there are not deeply rooted problems that need transforming. But “broken”?! That seems a slap in the face to the thousands who work in our nation’s schools.)

On his site, How the University Works, Marc Bousquet brings this point to light:

I’d like to see a few more of us start to question the objectivity of The New York Times and Washington Post, both corporations with increasingly large hopes that profits from their education ventures will prop up sagging journalism revenues. The Post, which owns Kaplan and shocked readers by blatantly pushing Kaplan’s legislative agenda in print and in person is already an education corporation that owns a newspaper as a sideline.

What is curious is that even Fox & Friends has discovered what the Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Post knew a long time ago: The Obama/Duncan algorithm for improving our nations’ schools has a hidden variable — profitability.

Non-union teachers + prepackaged curricula + (test x test x test) = Corporate Bling Package

Standardizing content across the country simplifies what all teachers teach, making it easier to . . .

Increase class size and save moola on teachers (especially the union-free teachers in charter schools who get paid less & have fewer benefits), which frees up money for . . .

Buying curricula in bulk from major textbook companies (which are more profitable to produce in larger numbers) which will necessitate. . .

Buying tests designed specifically for those prepackaged curricula, which will be justified because it will help prepare students for . . .

Super-sized multiple-choice assessments to determine if teachers are teaching, which will . . .

Earn testing companies stacks of benjamins for administrating & scoring those tests, and has the added benefit of . . .

Determining which teachers should be fired, so newer, cheaper teachers can be hired, and more curricula can be bought to raise scores.

The private sector’s opportunity to profit handsomely from this brand of standardization has stockholders salivating & lobbyists scheming. The Chamber of Commerce, at the behest of former FL governor Jeb Bush (whose younger brother, Neil, profits from NCLB & RTTT), has become a testifying standard anywhere education reform is on the legislative docket.

It all makes me wonder if ed reform is being driven by Superman, or Lex Luthor.

What if we are asking the wrong questions?

What if the propagandized central conflict, Unions vs. Good Teaching, isn’t the central conflict after all? What if it is just a sub-plot? What if the problem is much more complex than that?

What if the central argument, “Pay great teachers for student achievement and great teachers will flock to the classroom” doesn’t hold water? What if the actual teachers we want teaching and shaping our youth are not the ones attracted by promises of pay for performance?

What if wooing and keeping great teachers requires a different sort of honey altogether?

Unfortunately, no-one is asking what it takes to attract (and retain) the truly innovative educators who can provide the transformative learning experiences that transcend race, gender, and socio-economic status. It seems assumed that bonuses, based on centralized high-stakes tests, will be enough.

In a tweet-versation with RiShawn Biddle (@DropoutNation), an education journalist and ed reform advocate, I asked if the current slate of reforms was likely to narrow the curriculum and decrease educator autonomy. He replied that it would, that it was necessary. This made me wonder what it would take to attract and keep the best and the brightest (the most ambitious and well educated among us) to the field of teaching. So I asked him.

His response?

They need more than a paycheck. They need an environment which allows them to utilize their skills in new and creative ways. In essence, they need autonomy and the flexibility to work in a professional atmosphere where they have latitude.

And therein lies our paradox. We want/need the best and the brightest to embrace teaching as a profession, but our brand of ed reform vinegar (high stakes testing, value added firing, & standardized everything) is a hook without a worm. It doesn’t attract and/or keep the very candidates we need flocking to our schools.

Superman & the Justice League

We seem to hope that by testing the kryptonite out of students Superman will arrive. However, him being faster than a speeding bullet doesn’t make him a silver bullet. We’ll need more than Superman if we aim to make meaningful, relevant, and lasting changes to our national school system.

We’ll need the entire Justice League in order to effectively address the central conundrums of transforming our schools into learning environments of equality where students are engaged, enabled, and empowered.

Our villains are many:

Poverty
Lack of parent involvement
Untenable dropout rates
Too few high achievers in the field of teaching
Overly specific centralized learning goals
Undervalued teaching profession
Inaccurate measures of teacher effectiveness
Overuse of high stakes assessments as a cure all
Elitism

To tackle these villains, we must recruit & engage every one of the Justice League heroes, many of whom are dedicated teachers who’ve been asked to stay quiet and do as they’re told for far too long.

The Justice League is supposed to be a collection of people banded together in mutual cooperation.

Too bad they’ve been left off of Superman’s panel.

Thanks a lot, Man of Steel. You could’ve gotten a teacher on the panel if you wanted. After all, with that cool x-ray vision thing you got going, you should be able to see through their shenanigans.

This post was originally published on Ecology of Education.

Justice League Image: OSU Department of Statistics

Lex Luthor Image: Prodigeek

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Posted in Accountability, Arne Duncan, Big Idea, Collaboration, Duncan, Edreform, Education, Education Reform, educational reform, Jason Flom, Merit pay, Michelle Rhee, NCLB, Schools, Teacher Evaluation, Teacher Pay, Teacher's Unions, Testing

Tags: Education Education Nation Education Policy Education Reform Justice League Lex Luthor NBC Rhee Superman Teacher Leaders unions Waiting for Superman

Problem X: eXploring and eXposing Problems In Education Reform

April 22nd, 2010

Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

When it comes to the problems of education reform, there has been a lot of great thinking done by a lot of great people. Ask a thousand educators, students, parents, researchers, business people, or politicians what the problems of education are in America today and you are bound to get a thousand different answers. Ask these same people how to solve these problems and you will get a thousand different solutions.

The problem of education in America today is not just a simple problem, or even a complex problem, but a wicked problem. But it’s more than a wicked problem… it is an X-problem.

Adam Richardson of frog design coined the term X-problem in his new book Innovation X.

Adam explains that most organizations or systems face 4 types of problems.

Simple Problems: These are problems for which both the problem and solution are easily defined.

Which budget should be used to purchase supplemental materials? Which grade level will require an additional teacher next year? Who is going to teach the new section of Latin? Which classrooms need instructional aides?

Complex Problems: Here the problem is known, but the solution is not.

How can we get students to complete their homework? Which technology is best to introduce into an elementary classroom? Which curriculum will best meet the needs of our students who are two years below grade level? How do we create a system that allows for student input? What is the most effective assessment of reading comprehension for English Learners? How can we increase teacher collaboration and trust?

Wicked Problems: The challenge here is that neither the problem nor the solution is known. How can you define a good solution when cannot even state what the problem is?

The wicked problem was a term coined in the 1960′s by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel. He described them as messy, confounding, and aggressive. In 1968, C. West Churchman detailed the issue of wicked problems in an issue of Management Science.

Churchman describes wicked problems as, ” a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.”

There is no definitive statement of the problem, and each solution reveals new aspects of the problem.

How do we fix public education? What is the problem? Which part is broken?

Take the issue of technology. Is technology essential in education? Do we need more technology in school? How much technology is enough in school? Which technology should we focus on? Who decides? How do we measure it? How do we pay for it?

Or take the issue of creativity. Do we attempt to teach creativity or let students use their own creativity? Can creativity be taught? If so, who should teach it? How do we measure it? Is there good creativity and bad creativity? Is creativity in school even a problem?

Or how about the questions of making students go to school longer. They do they go more days or should they go longer each day? What about breaks? Should they go to school on Saturday? How long is too long? Do we pay teachers more for the longer day or just for more days?

Each one of the problems opens us another can of worms as you dive deeper into it. There are so many factors involved with each. What does the research say? What do the parents think? What is best for the brain? How will it impact the budget? Who makes the final decisions? Who is in charge? What is best for our society? Which will ensure success in the future? Is it scalable? Who should be involved in crafting the solution?

As you try to answer these questions more questions arise. It really gets…wicked.

None of these “problems” can be explicitly stated as a problem statement, because, they may or may not even be problems. It all depends on your perspective.

Since there is no definitive problem, there is no definitive solution.

Can’t fix it if we can’t point out exactly what is we need to fix.

Each wicked problem is risky because it is unique, and it’s hard to test or simulate solutions ahead of time.

There is no way to simulate a new public education system in America, without actually building a new public education system in America. Simulating a school model here or there does not provide solutions or the same experience as a new system of public education. The scale is simply not comparable.

There are many stakeholders with different perspectives on the problem and how to resolve it.

Teacher, parent, student, administrator, union official, county official, state official, federal official, education researcher, business person, school board member, elected city, county, state, and federal politician, statistician, economist, sociologist, technologist, etc. They all have a different definition of the problem and a different solution.

But there is a problem even more difficult to grapple with than the wicked problem.

It’s called the X-problem. Why X-problems? Adam shares his thinking on why X represents another level of problem.

X is extreme: X-problems are extreme in risk and complexity.

Educating an entire country’s population and building a system that does it in the most effective way is a risky proposition. You can’t build the wrong system. You can’t make a mistake.

X is mysterious: Every X-problem revolves around questions that have never been asked before, or challenges that are unprecedented.

Solving the “problems” of education and doing so in a way that meets all the needs of all the stakeholders now and in the future is going to create some questions that we have never encountered of thought of.

X is a crossroad: A crossroads is a place where things converge together—and diverge outward. At a crossroads one must make a choice among paths, each of which could entail risk or opportunity.

Do we take the road of creativity, technology, brain research, etc? Saying yes to certain solutions requires that we say no to others. Which do we choose?

X means opportunity: X marks the spot for treasure—the winnings that come from finding the problem and capitalizing on it before others can.

In the global competition for knowledgeable, creative, innovative, caring, informed, collaborative, cooperative, and intelligent populace, the country that can figure out which problems to solve and which solutions to choose will have an advantage in the future.

See what I mean? This is not easy. It’s not a simple, complex, or even a wicked problem. Education reform is an X-problem.

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Posted in Edreform, educational reform, Rob Jacobs, Uncategorized

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