The Education Business Blog

I was at the same meeting and noticed the same bovine indifference to the nature of the crisis. Some are munching contentedly on the grass and a few pick up their heads because they think they hear the howl of wolves. Both kinds will get killed if they don't take appropriate action. Every year another cohort of millions of children enter this broken system. Every year millions of children from multiple cohorts leave - some to to college, some to private schools or home schools, and (unfortunately) some to jail.

For each family it's a crisis; for the hirelings running the show it's a concern.

(Sorry to get so strident, but just because the water isn't at a rolling boil yet doesn't mean we're not being cooked.)

I'm simultaneously encouraged and worried by the initiatives the current DoED has launched. I'm encouraged because we need to learn how to measure, evaluate, intervene, and modify our practices. I'm worried because I think we measure what's easy instead of what's necessary. Accurate measurement and aggregation and analysis and reporting of the wrong data primitives won't lead to useful outcomes.

Let me unpack these two thoughts:

>>>Measurement and analysis - why?

Consider the case of crude oil. It is an undifferentiated mass of hydrocarbons of different length/complexity. As such, it isn't good for much on it's own except fouling beaches and aquatic creatures. There are differences between "heavy" sulfur-bearing oil and "light sweet crude", but it's still the case that both are pretty nasty to work with directly.

The public education system is like crude oil - all manner of schools, teachers, state standards, and (political incorrectness warning) cultural milieus are mixed together and handled in a homogeneous fashion. Some (the troubled districts) have a lot of sulfur; others are more like light sweet crude.

In order to get anything useful, you need to refine(crack) the oil and fractionate it. Jet fuel for jets, gasoline for cars, asphalt for roads, and aromatics for the plastic and pharma indistries.

Let me be clear - I'm not applying this to the debate between mainstreaming vs. pull-out for SPED and TAG students or tracked vs. diverse classes. That would be a subject for at least two posts in themselves. I *am* applying the metaphor to the institutions and the adults that inhabit and operate them.

The issue is not that we can't tell the difference between "Miss Honey" and "Agatha Trunchbull" - it's that we don't have a refinery that can systematically and fairly separate them and sort them into different careers. Worse yet, every time we try to build a refinery the crude oil mutates into "The Blob" and engulfs and fouls the plant.

It's not just the unions - it's also the States themselves. The former don't want you to "crack" the membership into those who can, those who could, and those who can't and shouldn't. The latter don't want you to create common scales across all states because the "leaded" states don't want to be identified and the "unleaded" states don't want to be adulterated.

Proper measurement (of the right data) and thoughtful analysis backed by a functional staffing system would quickly refine the teaching and administrative cadre. It's not just the union teachers but non-union supervisors. Weak principals can't create strong staffs, after all.

>>>Measuring what's important instead of what's easy.

I'm not patting myself on the back with this next statement, but my measured IQ as a child and teen were close to 4 standard deviations above the mean. I remember my dad telling me when I was very young (1st or 2nd grade) not to be overly proud or worried about it; he said "the only person who is really a genius is someone who creates a work of genius". That was my first lesson that outcomes are the goal; inputs are a means to that goal.

Similarly, the cheap mass-graded high-stakes tests which are fixed-form and directed response aren't fitted to the outcomes our society needs. They are suited to measuring waste in the inputs - that is, how much is retained (temporarily) when students are trained to memorize and regurgitate. Worse yet, they don't improve students' ability to create and contribute commensurate with the time spent in preparation and administration.

It's as if we are worried about student's running a fever or having chills and using a yardstick instead of a thermometer. We need to care about outcomes - what the students are capable of connecting and creating - instead of what they've been exposed to and "retain". To shift to yet another metaphor, we're goose farmers grading the quality of the the foie gras after years of force-feeding - and somehow hoping the geese are fit for flight instead of slaughter.

So - what *should* we measure? We should measure the ability to break down complex challenges and build new solutions. We should measure the ability to contribute and collaborate. We should measure the ability to consider and communicate. These are not measurements amenable to cheap, mass-produced tests. These are not outcomes that can be achieved through cheap human curriculum delivery systems (aka teachers) who barely understand their subjects and what the real world of knowledge work is about. It will take a steady diet of hands-on mentoring by professional mentors supplemented by skill-based adaptive constructed-response testing. Instead of capping the year with bubble sheets, cap it with the delivery of a product or project. If you want to see what a final exam should look like, check out any of the TED talks (http://www.ted.com/talks). Mix that with something like a thesis defense and you have the ideal to which we ought to be striving.

If our schools produced students who could collaborate to produce "tiny TEDs" (qualitative outcomes) as well as individualized skill maps for each student (quantititative outcomes) not only would we be able to continuously improve students' lives, but we'd invigorate and continuously improve schools and the communities they're in. We'd also stop fearing for a loss of our quality of life in this country and would leave fewer adults behind as our economy shifts from industrial factory work to mass-customized knowledge innovation work.

>>>Time to herd - or flee - or evolve?

The crisis at hand is that the system we've had for only a little longer than a century isn't suited for the demands of the next decade (let alone the next century). Without serious course correction and retooling the system will exponentially expand a permanent underclass ill-suited for anything more than receiving bread-and-circuses from an increasingly imperial and decadent government. This will cause the fall of our Republic. The opportunity in the midst of this crisis is to *refine* the creativity and energy of children and teach them to be creators and not merely consumers.

Are the folks in control of policy and funding and hiring and firing and training capable of changing our direction? Are the policies and practices enablers of change or agents of stasis? If not, perhaps it's time to seek folks who haven't been formed by and experienced in the ways of a failing system and instead change the rules and leaders to adopt the ways of something successful. The remaining policy question becomes whether or not change can be continuous or must be discontinous. Fortunately, we don't need to guess - there is a pretty good practice of "Management of Change" that's developed over the last several years. We should apply these ideas and could quickly identify which clusters of educational practice can smoothly transition from current to desired future states and which ones simply require a big bang of discontinous change.

The bovine indifference of many of our leaders? Herding together and doing the same thing while hoping you're not one of the weak ones that get picked off isn't a good strategy. Neither is stampeding madly off into the distance (where there might be worse dangers like a cliff). It's time to learn to stand upright, develop opposable thumbs, and create tools and master fire. Tame the wolves and make them faithful dogs.