A REQUIEM FOR SCHOOL INNOVATION? After Decades of Fleeting School Reform Initiatives, Are We Still Waiting for Superman, or Is It Fair to Ask if School Reform Is Dead?
...We might conclude that urban school districts are doomed to failure, that no amount of money and creativity can overcome their substantial governance limitations. Or instead we might...brace ourselves, and accept that there are no pain-free shortcuts...
Williams, Connor, 2015. Review: In Dale Russakoff's "The Prize," an Urgent Education Catastrophe Overflowing with Culprits and Caveats
In today's K-12 school systems, IT innovations may have penetrated into operational, informational, and communications infrastructures, but classrooms and instructional practices still look much like they did fifty years ago...
This evident continuity and resistance to change obscures some meaningful incremental changes in attitudes and approaches, and the assertion that schools have changed little is not meant to imply anything about how instruction should change or needs to change...But isn't it intriguing that a practice that is the object of so much hand wringing and public scrutiny has remained so static, even in an era of ever accelerating innovation?Given the fate of so many fleeting reform initiatives over many decades, to speak figuratively of a REQUIEM is perhaps fitting, but this post is the first in a series, and is meant not to express pessimism, but to provide context for our subsequent reporting on current school reform strategies. Highlighting how intractable K-12 reform has been will help us better appreciate what is different, and perhaps more promising, about emerging approaches to school reform today.These new road maps for school change are not rooted in prescriptive academic theories. Nor do they superimpose private sector models of innovation and success or naively rely on solving all problems with new funding streams. Instead, by reverse engineering exemplary (if rare) large-scale reform initiatives, they offer road maps for improving the larger systems themselves. They focus strategically on critical organizational principles, networks, and belief systems of school culture, in order to transform those cultures and foster resiliency and capacity...a readiness to embrace change (rather than resist change), the capacity to successfully adopt, scale, sustain, and improve upon meaningful innovations.These new road maps for school innovation not only take into account critical features of adaptive change within the educational organization, they also give external partners urgent insights into the unique challenges of working with large school systems. These insights will help education sector companies and nonprofits collaborate more proactively and effectively with education leaders struggling to negotiate change and foster innovation within a politically charged public institution constrained by rigid compliance mandates and in the crosshairs of partisan interest groups and culture wars.Before looking further into these new road maps, however, we will be much more realistic in the challenges facing initiatives for school innovation and be more adept at evaluating and assessing the emerging insights into successful large-scale K-12 innovation, if we have a fuller picture of the extent to which schools have so often, and for so long, resisted significant innovation and disruption.So...while EdPro Communications is looking forward to issuing future posts and reports on the new models for successful, large-scale K-12 innovations...First, the requiem!This "requiem" for school reform provides a brief but enlightening overview of the intriguing stasis that characterizes public K-12 education in the US over multiple decades and spanning two centuries.Note to reader: This "requiem" is intended to be instructive for finding ways forward...it's not intended as criticism of schools or the dedicated professionals who contribute so much to them. It is not meant to affirm what is often asserted in the public discourse and press--namely that our schools are "failing." The K-12 landscape is far more complex than that, and the structures and challenges it contends with are too rarely understood and too rarely impartially observed. There are also many factors that make it difficult to assess outcomes with transparency and empirically accuracy (some popular beliefs to the contrary)....All of these factors perhaps among the many that contribute to decades of stasis.
(For an albeit overtly partisan but also big picture look at US schools and academic achievement measures in the context of public perceptions and public discourse, with extensive data on academic performance measures in US K-12 public education, see Ravitch, Diane, 2014. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Schools.)
Decades of academic interest in and public calls for pedagogical and instructional reform and innovation have had some effect on teacher attitudes and curriculum content and design, but most of America's K-12 classrooms are very similar to what they were fifty years ago....And while you are likely to see Chromebooks and other personal electronic devices appearing on students' desks alongside binders and spiral notebooks, the tried and true learning configurations from generations ago are still largely undisrupted, despite the use of new digital "tools."
Even more significant, this pedagogical stasis has also proven immune to a more recent generation of reform efforts, including reforms that were championed by influential technology entrepreneur-philanthropists who are no less than global leaders in cutting edge technology innovation, disruptive business models, and radical market transformations...reforms that nonetheless have left the status quo largely unfazed.
Schools past...schools present...I don't want to give away my age entirely...let's just say "circa 1968" I was attending elementary school. Seems like a long time ago, right?..1968...conjures up Jefferson Airplane, the Vietnam War, 8-cylinder station wagons, phone booths, General Electric, the March on Washington, D.C., the Summer of Love, the Big Three TV Networks, 8-track tape players...?Fast forward to today...Consider that a 5th grader today has never lived on a planet without cellphones. Or consider those stores that opened for the first time in the 1990s to rent DVDs (remember those?)--today's fifth graders probably never saw, nor will see, one of those--proof that something can be both of the future, present, and past all in one short breath!
If someone asked you to give a reckoning of the technological and social innovation we've seen from 1968 to 2018 (a minuscule time span in terms of human history), the task of enumerating the innovations, especially in, only in, business and technology, would be daunting. Within a generation, many predict we will furthermore witness massive upheaval and innovation in medicine and genetic engineering, in climate and climate change effects and policies (hence energy production and distribution as well), and in the very underlying fabric of our modern economic democracies (think social media for example, debates around a national universal income, etc....) as the pace of innovation and automation outstrip the rhythms and cadences of our natural life cycles and distort the established arcs of what we have known as our traditional labor- and wage-based economy.Now come with me for a moment to my local elementary school, which happens to be part of a very progressive and well-funded district. It all seems perfectly natural there until....well until I stop and think about it through the lens of how I remember elementary school from "back in the day," when I was in say 3rd grade or 5th grade...
Honestly, aside from the cart that stores and charges Chromebooks (and the absence of film strip projectors), I would be hard pressed to find any difference between the school of 1968 and the school of 2018....Okay white boards are more common than chalk boards, but the desks look the same, the bookshelves are familiar, and the overhead projector is still prominent in many classrooms. On most counts--the physical dimensions, staff profiles, student classroom arrangements and behaviors, student-teacher ratios, fundamental core curricula, and fundamental site and district governance structures--school is the way it always has been....It's like...back to the future!Larry Cuban, Ph.D., a professor Emeritus at Stanford University, former teacher of teachers, former school teacher, and former school district superintendent, described the K-12 rabbit hole this way in a classic, sweeping historical survey of innovation (or the lack thereof) in a century of so called US education progress:
I have been in many classrooms in the last decade. When I watched teachers in secondary schools a flash of recognition jumped out of my memory and swept over me. What I saw was almost exactly what I remembered of the junior and senior high school classrooms that I sat in as a student and as a teacher in the mid 1950s. This acute sense of recall about how teachers were teaching occurred in many different schools.Cuban, Larry, 1984. How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890 - 1980, 1st Ed., New York and London: Longman Press, p. 1
Cuban sees some fundamental shifts taking place over the course of the 20th century... away from a rigid adherence to teacher-centered classroom practices, for example, to progressively more student-centered approaches. In the larger analysis though, Cuban sees stasis as the most remarkable trait. This realization is paradoxical given the fervor, resources, and pontificating devoted to school reform during many decades of the 20th century.For Cuban, these decades of "reform" are marked by a bewildering disconnect between theory and public discourse on the one hand, and actual changes (or lack thereof) in teaching practices at the classroom level (Cuban 1984, p. 2):
Since the late 1950s, reforms in curriculum (e.g. new math), governance (e.g. community control), instruction (e.g. team teaching) have tried to alter teacher behavior in the classroom. There should be a page in the Guinness Book of World Records on failed classroom reforms, for few ever seem to have been incorporated into teachers' repertoires (Cuban 1984, p. 6).
Cuban's vantage point is slightly dated, but it's hands down the most vast historical survey of classroom practices over multiple decades.What central metaphor does Cuban settle on to underscore this paradox?...Nothing less than the image of a deep sea tomb immune to hurricane winds raging on the water's surface:
Classrooms are calm refuges from change, deep below the ocean's surface, while above the tempests of school reform, of alarms over perceived school failures that would threaten everything from GDP to National Security, the parade of new theories, and of academic conferences rife with reformist jargon, all rage in fury on the sea's surface...(Cuban 1984, p. 2).
(As a former educator I get Cuban's metaphor here, but I also have to differ on one point...I wish classrooms and school systems could be rightfully called "calm refuges..." maybe some really are...but in many urban districts, it's anything but...In fact, we will see in a moment that another observer of school culture explained the lack of change in schools not as calm stillness, but in terms of a professional culture so besieged by external pressures and internal stresses that it operated in a state of metaphorical martial law, building bulwarks against the threats it perceived on all sides, including change and innovation as such.)Some progressive reforms have taken root over time--more openness to student-centered teaching configurations, understanding diverse learning styles, understanding different modalities of "testing" and their useful roles and applications (e.g. summative vs. formative assessments), and more recently consensus on national curriculum standards that, in the case of most states, have added rigor to learning targets in our evolving digital age, when the high school diploma is a mere preliminary stepping stone to many years of near universal post-secondary education and training.These changes are not insubstantial, but if you look at school systems over a century, these are ripples of reform, not waves.Indeed, let's look at just one arbitrary example that illustrates this--the tenacity of the traditional 50-minute, subject-matter-specific instructional block--what most of us will remember being called a "period," something fundamental to our school day (e.g., 1st period math, 2nd period English, 3rd period PE, 4th period science...). Sounds kind of nostalgic when you're 35, 40, or 50 (or more) years old, right? Well, in case you don't have children or haven't looked at their school schedule or been to back to school night recently, the school day hasn't changed much in this regard for most kids, and other schools generally offer only a slightly modified version of the same structure (such as the rotating block schedule for example).In contrast to this structural stasis, much more is understood today about the learning benefits and career relevance of curriculum designs that foster investigation, critical thinking, authentic problem solving, and collaboration. Whether you call it inquiry-based learning, blended learning, constructive or project-based learning, this kind of curriculum design and practice requires collaborative planning, team work (and task delegation) and lends itself to cross-curricular learning too. Now imagine a scenario in the work place of today, and the boss telling the team collaborating on critical projects that they could meet four to five days a week, but every team meeting would end abruptly with the sound of a bell or buzzer after 45 minutes maximum, and some days, due to other "business" the team might have only 20 or 30 minutes of time to meet and collaborate before being dismissed again until the next meeting day, and they would work only on the physics aspects of the project and have no interaction with the software team, the design team, or the math specialists assigned to the project....
Obviously, these kind of learning formats will be more coherent, productive, and organic for participants if the learning structures are more fluid in terms of instructional minutes, in terms of student and group autonomy, and in terms of more fluid integration of what are traditionally discrete curriculum areas.In many school districts, however, not only is curriculum design often left to the prerogative, habits, and interests of the individual teachers working alongside one another within a discrete school building and/or within a larger district school system, but even the shift to extended instructional blocks is still only an idea, or only being implemented inconsistently across individual schools within districts. By the same token, in all-day classroom settings (i.e. self-contained classrooms common in primary grades), it is still common for the instructional activities to be designed for 30-minute blocks of non-integrated subject matter content. Then in high schools and middle schools, even today, we still see faculty members and departments rigidly divided along the lines of single subject specialization (as if engineering involved physics but not language, or writing is an exercise in grammar and composition, not a tool of communication or a part of the problem-solving process itself...).This might seem like more proof that teachers and school administrators just can't deliver or are just lazy, or...But let's not forget...these artificial bell schedules and curriculum divisions are also largely preordained by established state-wide instructional policies--such as rigid instructional day and subject-matter-specific "instructional minute" requirements. All school administrators and design leaders must adhere to these rigid compliance regimens--a fact which understandably makes innovation seem unfeasible from the get go.Indeed the daunting compliance regime educators must "maneuver" within is perhaps a symptom of deeper cultural forces that simultaneously call out for reform while responding to reform with suspicion and caution. There is an inherent public fear in not fastidiously controlling something deemed so core to society in a context where we perceive ourselves as having to relinquish control of such a critically and ideologically charged mission to public servants against the backdrop of a national mythology that often engenders suspicion and derision toward public servants as a whole, less first responders perhaps, less my own kid's kindergarten teacher perhaps, but certainly it's often true in the public discourse with regard to public school teachers in general, with regard to concerns about sufficiently incentivizing their work and holding them accountable, with regard to the public assumptions that teachers just teach because they want summers off, or in the popular saw "those that can, do, those that can't, teach" and so on...There's more...take recruiting new teaching staff into the school structure. This has to be done according to its own set of rigidly prescribed credentialing criteria for teacher licensing. This perpetuates an unnaturally narrow and static profile base for the teacher profession. This inflexibility stands in stark contrast to the dynamic era of change, innovation, and cultural diversity we live in....A time when new careers (careers that didn't exist or were not even conceived of only 40 years ago, or perhaps as little as five years ago) are emerging every day...A time when economists and policy makers now accept as given that professionals will need regular retraining and education during their individual careers--retraining in their existing fields and perhaps ongoing education to move from disrupted fields of employment into emerging opportunities...A time when many careers will also push workers into deeper levels of specialized knowledge within collaborative teams that integrate diverse knowledge domains, such as "software coding," "user-interface design," "electrical engineering," "metadata analysis" and "biometric monitoring."Larry Cuban did not fail to observe the way in which compliance-based regimens, entrenched habits of mind, lack of public consensus, and the lack of coherent organizational initiative left reforms to simply wither on the vine...so many times that not only did change never take root, but the very notions of "change," "reform," and "innovation" came to be considered quixotic and illusory in demoralized professional ranks divided against one another along lines of idealism vs. cynicism. A few "naive" novices might passionately dedicate time, energy, and their own personal capital in the work place to driving some new initiative forward to improve learning, while their surrounding peers would view them with derision if not outright hostility because of the futility they knew was attached to such efforts...
Student-centered approaches, then, infrequently penetrated classrooms because of the unwillingness or incapacity of school officials to convert a policy decision or formal approval of an instructional change into a process that would gain teacher support for classroom adoption. The explanation contains within it the adage implementors are fond of using: It was a terrific idea; it is a shame it wasn't ever tried. The explanation also suggests that the very adoption of the innovation without subsequent organizational effort may have even strengthened the stability of existing practices by spreading the illusion of classroom change (Cuban 1984, p. 246, emphasis added).
Educators saw so many prophetic reforms come and go, that soon new reforms and those who championed them--rank and file peers or progressive leaders---were understandably met with doubt, mockery, or worse, a mere sigh of indifference.However, the understandable cynicism that lurks in the professional psyche of teachers and the structural policies that stratify and perpetuate teacher attitudes are only part of the picture when it comes to looking at school reform in the context of existing teacher beliefs and practices.
The socialization of education
While America--think Walt Whitman's America for example--may bubble with industry, with a rebellious and frontier-forged self-reliance, with semi-unified geographical and political confederations resisting conformity and unification, it could just be that the teaching profession spawned a uniquely more rigid, self-perpetuating socialization process within the larger external culture. Indeed, reading Cuban's study, I was reminded that a seminal 20th-century critique and examination of public education in America was titled: The Sociology of Teaching (Willard W. Waller, 1932). Reflecting on Waller's book and on the culture of teaching, Larry Cuban notes that teaching is the one profession where the future worker has already been, when going to school, exposed daily for 12 years (about 13,000 hours) to the habits, methods, and attitudes of the profession:
"Teachers intuitively absorbed lessons of how to teach as they watched. Within this explanation, the familiar assertion is heard that teachers teach as they were taught" (Cuban 1984, p. 244).
Cuban emphasizes that this cycle of professional indoctrination has no parallel in other professions and is likely a formidable source of stasis in teaching practices. Cuban recalls the longtime teacher union leader, Albert Shanker, marveling at the way this socialization process flattened out the profession:
Ten thousand new teachers each year enter the New York City school system as a result of retirement, death, job turnover, and attrition. These new teachers come from all over the country. They represent all religions, races, political persuasions, and educational institutions. But the amazing thing is that, after three weeks in the classroom you can't tell them from the teachers they replaced ("Interview with Albert Shanker," Principal, Vol. 53, No. 3, March/April, 1974, p. 48. Cited in Cuban 1984, p. 1).
Although published more than 80 years ago, the Sociology of Teaching continues to pose a challenge to school reform leaders:
...Since the 1960s scholars have increasingly recognized the significance and staying power of [Waller's] pioneering analysis of the sociological characteristics of schools...As it turns out, Waller's bleak vision of schools and his pessimism about the difficulty of changing schools and teachers were prophetic. The sustained school reform movement that began with the 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, failed to appreciate until the late 1990s one of Waller's key insights: "The reformation of the schools must begin with the teachers, and no program that does not include the personal rehabilitation of teachers can ever overcome the passive resistance of the old order" (1932, p. 458)...Waller understood acutely what few policymakers have grasped about the fundamental nature of schools: They are highly institutionalized "small societies," run by employees with a strong feeling of vulnerability to pressures, both from within and without...Waller believed that schools are typically run on autocratic principles and often develop a garrison mentality. The result, he argued, is that the school is "a despotism in a state of perilous equilibrium" (1932, p. 10). "The school is continually threatened," he said, "because it is autocratic, and it has to be autocratic because it is threatened" (1932, p. 11)...Those who fail to recon with these consequences, he suggested, will fail in efforts to reform schools.Boyd, W.L. "Willard W. Waller 1889-1945" [downloaded 9/21/2018]
Waller's book was published some eighty years ago. It's worth reminding ourselves that a private industry leader will get kudos for increasing ROI or boosting company earnings, and that effort and success toward that end are likely to be rewarded and generate accolades. In education, innovation and change are a constant object of public controversy and scrutiny. Teachers must struggle with being themselves and also being an acceptable representative of social and cultural expectations across their community--both in terms of how they teach and the attitudes and "morals" they might communicate to students (even today, there are examples of teachers stripped of jobs and licenses for merely posting a vacation photo on a social media platform if there was compromising attire or visible alcoholic drinks).Being "pioneering," "cutting edge," and "innovating" can be high-risk endeavors in a setting where the "benefits" of innovative or avant-garde practices are likely to be hard to measure with the same more black and white time frames and metrics one can apply to increased revenues or profit margins in a private enterprise. Likewise, diverse constituents are likely to have strong opinions about how the rank and file teacher should do his or her job. Internal stakeholders--the teacher's superiors--will be relying on the rank and file to put into practice those methods, curriculum resources, and policies and values that are crucial to the explicit and implicit covenants that allow school leaders to maintain the trust, support, and goodwill of the communities and families they serve and represent as public employees.
There are outstanding district teachers working heroically in these conditions. Teach For America alumni Princess Williams, Charity Haygood, and Dominique Lee loom particularly large. But their work faces constant headwinds. They ask the district to allow them flexibility to redesign and turn around one of its failing schools, only to have core elements of their strategy--a focus on the early grades and authority to pick their staff--rebuffed."Williams, Connor, 2015. Review: In Dale Russakoff's "The Prize," an Urgent Education Catastrophe Overflowing with Culprits and Caveats
Likewise, these forces for conformity may take on a further life of their own across the teacher's own immediate peers as well--some teachers balance inherent demands and stresses of teaching with efficiencies they feel they gain through habit, routine, and repetition. Not only would pushing out into uncharted waters be risky, it's also likely to require more time and effort. Colleagues who advocate for or whose practices implicitly signal that there are better methods and practices to adopt, may not only run afoul of superiors, but may not find consensus among many (including some very sincere and dedicated) colleagues, and they may also stoke the ire of those factions they see in the lunch room everyday who see innovation and disruption not in terms of potential learning outcomes, but in terms of the threat they pose to the continuity and predictability that they feel make the career sustainable for them.Somewhat ironically, those most likely to be least interested in learning new tricks, who perceive the greater benefit in stasis and in maintaining comfortable, easy-to-replicate methods, are the old timers, the colleagues who are the most senior, and also often the more adept at controlling and manipulating the immediate work environment. These same teachers may have also witnessed the greatest number of fleeting reforms and may have bitter memories of their early years in the profession, expending valuable energy on the "next great thing" in teaching, only to see it defunded after one or two years...School reform and the American value wars...When Waller observed a "garrison" mentality in schools, it was no doubt due in large part to the ideological controversies that frequently engulf schools and distort school reform efforts. The dreams that Americans and American educators have for their children and their schools are often passionate, value laden, and heart felt. In virtual diametric opposition to these dreams, as we have seen, are the bureaucratic constraints and regulations that monopolize school leaders' efforts--day-to-day operations for hosting hundreds or thousands of young clients...student and personnel due process procedures...critical liability and safety monitoring...licensing and instructional requirements...All of these detailed laws and policies (local, state, and federal) stipulate in large measure what leeway school leaders have and don't have when it comes to turning their dreams into day-to-day reality.Despite these tremendous obstacles to change and innovation, it is equally true that the value-laden social aspirations we have for our schools are akin to a persistent "call to arms" that leave schools and school leaders the object of constant public pressure and scrutiny. These aspirations also directly bear on the promise of school reform, making reform efforts part of a complex public and social endeavor, not one based mostly on "rational" attributes such as realistic knowledge of resources and demands on resources, accurate understanding of current educational challenges, empirical analysis of best practices and learning performance....Indeed, our public aspirations for schools and school reform and innovation are hardly uniform, and they are often more partisan than they are pragmatic or well informed as such.For example, a recent major Stanford University/PACE report on K-12 learning in California found a critical lack of coherent longitudinal data around student performance and outcomes and also identified the critical role played by preschool and early childhood education settings and early primary grade experiences with regard to longer term student achievement (FORUM Radio Program (KQED Radio, September 19, 2018)Trending headlines in the state in recent years, however, have mostly focused on high-profile challenges to teacher tenure or fixated on which politicians support or do not support charter school funding and expansion (when most evidence suggests that charter schools and conventional public schools in the state are having similar outcomes with regard to student achievement).Clashing and disjointed belief systems and conflicting cultural visions are sources of persistent turmoil and friction for school systems, both externally and internally (if such a distinction, between external and internal, really matters here). Belief systems can impact school innovation initiatives very directly, in at least three ways. First, conflicting public belief systems make it difficult for school leaders, even at the macro school level (state and district levels), to forge unified, bold, and decisive policies that can accelerate change and modernization. Second, local school leaders and staff--no matter how expert, how informed, how experienced, how able--can be fully stymied, if not by compliance minutiae alone, then by the leadership networks and policies stipulated by leaders higher up the chain.Finally, even in a scenario where system-wide and local leadership can forge a bold reform consensus, existing teacher practices and divergent belief and socialization factors within the rank and file, within a school, or within a mere faction of a larger school, can easily be a source of friction in their own right. And, if nothing else, there are formidable obstacles merely in regard to how to carry out and how to pay for system-wide restructuring and retraining when your budget is based on existing teaching operations and doesn't allow you to train extensively while also teaching (as needs must be of course) simultaneously. Hence the day-to-day operations that must be sustained through thick and thin, and which must continue in the background whatever innovation banner the business or academic experts are waving. These dominant routines are constantly shaping and defining practices, attitudes, and skill sets along the lines of stasis, while school leaders (if not overwhelmed themselves by the day-to-day) wrestle, on the margins of these mostly all-consuming efforts, with how to institutionalize new findings, new methods, new structures, new ways of configuring classrooms and traditional "teacher" / "student" roles within schools.
This is a story where more or less everyone in Newark loses. There is no easy solution to the city’s deep and persistent troubles. So in addition to the many culprits, “The Prize” is also — appropriately — packed with caveats: Sure, Newark’s school district is a dysfunctional embarrassment, but changing it dramatically ignites huge pushback. But slow progress is leaving kids stuck. But fast progress bothers lots of community stakeholders. But community stakeholders want schools to get better quickly. But they don’t like those leading the effort. And so on.Williams, Connor, 2015, Review: In Dale Russakoff's "The Prize," an Urgent Education Catastrophe Overflowing with Culprits and Caveats
Whatever reforms, insights, and innovations our elite universities and our pragmatic, discovery-based, entrepreneuring, intellectual-property-rights-valuing society might have (and have had in the past) to proffer to the education establishment, the seminal studies of Cuban (1984) and Waller (1932) highlight the enduring forces of stasis deeply embedded in the overlapping systems that make up "schools" and which structurally resist and discourage change and innovation.
So much for the old reforms...What about the new wave of education entrepreneurs and philanthropists of the 21st century?...Supermen?... White knights?...Cavalry to the Rescue?...
21st-Century Reform Efforts and the New Era of Tech Philanthropy--Calvary to the Rescue? Or...Custer's Last Stand?
Under skies darkened by smoke, gunfire and flying arrows, 210 men of the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Unit led by Lt. Colonel George Custer confronted thousands of fierce Sioux and Cheyenne warriors on June 25, 1876, near the Little Big Horn River in present-day Montana. In less than an hour, the Indians had massacred Custer and every one of his men. The ferocious Battle of the Little Big Horn has been ennobled as “Custer’s Last Stand” – but in truth, Custer and his men never stood a fighting chance.McDermont, Annette. History Stories What Really Happened at Custer's Last Stand [downloaded 9/21/2018]
The first decades of the 21st century saw their own waves of reform initiatives. The most flamboyant and high profile efforts did not stem from academic research, as in the past, but from confident and highly successful tech entrepreneurs who sought to experiment with applying disruptive social engineering and business acumen to public schools, with the backing of their own deep pocket philanthropic spending.No longer would lack of funding distort the intrinsic merits of a reform plan or undermine its longer term success....And the new wave of reforms and innovations had unprecedented credentials--an infusion not only of cash, but of a private sector ethos that could drive out entrenched bureaucratic paralyses and financial inefficiencies...an ethos that had recently revolutionized whole industries and markets....
Philanthropic foundations including that of Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli and Edythe Broad, and the Walton Family spend nearly $4 billion a year on supporting public K-12 education in America.Simmons, Andrew, 2015. "Mishandling THE PRIZE: A New Book by Dale Roussakoff Examines the Pitfalls of Mark Zuckerberg's Generous Philanthropic Gift to Newark Public Schools." The Atlantic Monthly, September 22, 2015
A headline reform splash was made on September 24th 2010, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Newark Mayor Corey Booker abruptly unveiled on the Oprah Winfrey Show a $100 million initiative to reform the Newark New Jersey school system. Fast forward to 2015...The quixotic Zuckerberg-Booker initiative is retrospectively characterized as "The Great American Disaster" by The Atlantic Monthly in its review of Dale Russakoff's book The Prize--a detailed post-mortem of the failed reform effort.Zuckerberg was only one of the deep pocket entrepreneur-social-engineering-philanthropists trumpeting a disruptive revitalization of America's anemic schools. In June of 2018, the journal Business Insider reported on the failure of a $1 billion reform effort funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
A seven-year, nearly $1 billion education initiative centered on improving teaching quality in low-income schools — and bankrolled in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — largely failed to help students, according to a new report from the nonprofit policy think tank RAND.RAND was selected at the outset of the initiative by the Gates Foundation to evaluate whether the project improved outcomes for students."Overall...the initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly for LIM [low-income minority] students," the report's summary said.By 2015, six years into the initiative, "student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better," than in schools that didn't participate in the program, according to the RAND study.Burke, Jeremy, 2018. "A $1 Billion Gates Foundation-Backed Education Initiative Failed to Help Students..." Business Insider, June 27, 2018
While the old reforms were about pedagogy, the wave of more recent reforms, not only had unprecedented funding (over $200 million in Newark), but also had as a major catalyst the direct influence of high-profile tech CEOs and high profile and highly motivated (politically motivated) politicians, along with the promise of revolutionary information and communication technologies encapsulated in the great advent of our time: THE PERSONAL COMPUTER and THE WORLD WIDE WEB:
"Teachers, administrators, researchers, reformers, government leaders, parents, and others have long extolled the benefits that computer-based learning could have in schools. Educational video games...could make learning fun and motivating....Computers offer a way to customize instruction and allow students to learn in the way they are best wired to process information, in the style that conforms to them, and at a pace that matches their own. Computer-based learning on a large scale is also less expensive than the current labor intensive system and could solve the financial dilemmas facing public schools. For all these reasons and more, taxpayers, philanthropists, and corporations have spent more than $60 billion to equip schools with computers in just the last two decades. And yet the machines have made hardly any impact. As Stanford professor Larry Cuban has documented, computers have merely sustained how schools already operate."Christensen, C. M., and Horn, M. B., 2000. "How Do We Transform Our Schools?" Education Next, Vol. 8, Issue 3, (Summer): 1-7, p. 1
Given the money and technological and business acumen invested in our more recent wave of efforts to reform K-12 learning, it would perhaps seem even more naive to believe that school reform is anything other than a fool's errand...But what about charter schools?Alongside the flamboyant generals of private enterprise were the various cavalry reserves who penetrated the public school garrison through charter school structures. In many cases new leaders with business sector and nonprofit experience (and sometimes engaging in B2B and nonprofit partnerships) were attracted to the less rigid compliance requirements offered by charter frameworks and saw there an opportunity to demonstrate (and potentially disseminate) earnest and constructive innovations in student achievement, alongside the more high-profile forays into school reform of Zuckerberg, Gates, and the like. In other cases, private entrepreneurs used (or abused) charter school licenses in a more cynical ploy to siphon off public monies for personal profit (for extensive but also skeptical reporting on charter school operators, see Ravitch, Diane, 2014. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Schools).Overall, multiple decades of charter school experimentation have led to results that are basically as varied and predictable as those of conventional public schools, some performing well, others not, many in line with their traditional counterparts, despite charters having more control over whom they admit and other reprieves from rigid district compliance requirements.In its 2003 report for the California Legislative Analyst's Office, Charter School Operations and Performance: New Evidence From California, the Rand corporation found that using broad API measures [California Department of Education Academic Performance Index scores], there was no statistically significant differences in student achievement between conventional public schools and charter schools.When measuring individual student score data adjusted for demographic factors, the report concluded:
"...the elementary school reading score for comparable students in conventional public schools and charter schools is virtually identical, but each of the other scores is lower for charter schools (these differences are statistically significant)." Zimmer, Ron, 2003. Charter School Operations and Performance: New Evidence From California. RAND Education, pp. 44-47
In light of our larger observations, we can ask--do charter experiments operate free from conventional restraints in order to act on a broad and informed understanding of the dynamics that foster meaningful innovation?...On an informed understanding of the factors that repeatedly stymie school innovation efforts?...
Or, are most charter schools simply the offspring of an untried pedagogical theory or disgruntled community faction with idiosyncratic or reactive ideas about how to do it better?...
When all else fails...the scapegoats...Last but not least in the roster of would be contemporary reformers are the sundry soothsayers who would convince America that the single evil worm that needs to be wrenched from the bowels of K-12 school systems is teacher tenure...or the teacher unions...or restraints on the unhindered use of suspension and expulsion...These factions are perhaps barely worth mention, but they are too tenacious, too vocal, and too determined to merely ignore.Clearly, the decades of research, the diverse efforts, and more recently the phenomenal financial resources expended for consequential school change reveal the deep social and structural forces complicating reform efforts in schools and highlighting the fallacy of scapegoating "ineffective principals" or "incompetent or lazy teachers" (of whom I have met only a very few), or "teacher tenure" policies, or "teacher unions," or "budget cuts," or "wasteful spending"--finding examples of any or all of these, as they exist, as corollaries for low student achievement, etc...does not mean that they prove therefore to be the root cause you want them to be in your quest to find the "answer" or the "solution" to "fixing" schools...It's probably more complicated than we want it to be and it's easier to simply find the answer that fits our world view....I think this is what Connor Williams is trying to shout from the wilderness in his review of Dale Russakoff's book The Prize:
There's a tension here: either the reformers are going to be allowed to build an effective system, even when it's painful, or they're not. Yes--reforms are disruptive. Systemic dysfunction needs disrupting. "The Prize" is shot through with these sorts of tradeoffs. So if you read Russakoff's account and find your beliefs vindicated, you're not trying hard enough.Williams, Connor, 2015. Review: In Dale Russakoff's "The Prize," an Urgent Education Catastrophe Overflowing with Culprits and Caveats
I suspect that if any such "evil" genius is behind the formidable stasis that our schools exhibit, it might relate back to all of these politicized targets and help us to explain them to some degree, but is in fact actually something more than these. It is the inability of a politically polarized populace to achieve a comfortable consensus about what reforms and innovations benefit learners. It is this fractured populace's inability, my and your inability, to distinguish sufficiently between objective learning goals and outcomes and fractured and stubborn ideologies of cultural indoctrination...To this we can add the mere but frequently noted issue of the forces of "socialization" that also drive stasis--the towering, interlocking, and often poorly integrated or disjointed hierarchies extending down from federal departments, to state heads, to state heads of education, to state assemblies and voters, and downward to district superintendents and offices of education, to school buildings, principles, and staff...the ingrained adherence to hierarchies and rank and highly defined job roles within this complex public system...teacher mentor systems that are as often, or more often, based on seniority rather than on coherent and unified system-wide professional development goals...the risks inherent in risk-taking and merit-based outcomes within a public sponsored, public servant hierarchy...the self-fulfilling socialization process itself...and the abiding capitulation to the normative bureaucratic rank and file structures as such.
So much time...so little change?
In the years of burgeoning research from expanding education faculty in academic programs of higher education and with catalysts such as the post-war prosperity of the 1950s and the cultural and intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, some changes did of course seep into the culture of K-12 learning during the 20th century. All in all, however, your local school yard and school classroom (with few exceptions when you look at school systems nationwide) have remained fundamentally the same as they were two generations ago. Meanwhile technology, the economies of labor and workforce readiness, the nature of work itself, the worlds of media and communications...all have witnessed changes which can probably be called revolutionary.In the midst of such storms, to revive Dr. Cuban's metaphor, and whether you consider it miraculous or dismal, comforting or alarming, predictable or unlike anything imaginable...the local school, in most cases, has remained an island of stasis and nostalgic familiarity.That said, as we look forward to future posts and reports on the emerging consensus around the factors critical to and which account for rare but consequential examples of large scale education reform efforts, we might ask ourselves the following questions:
Will these emerging frameworks take into account the bureaucratic relationships within school systems and the top-down structures that can easily impede innovation?
How do they capitalize on the collective expertise and experience of rank and file educators while also recognizing and addressing the obstacles to reform inherent in traditional aspects of teacher socialization?
Do they take into account, realistically, the political and bureaucratic forces and rigid regulatory frameworks school reformers must contend with?
Do they take into account critical external relationships and external stakeholder partnerships--critical for both political survival and support, and critical for fostering real-world innovation with access to cutting edge technological resources and to emerging vocational knowledge and expertise?
To what extent do these frameworks provide both aspiring internal school reform leaders and also their external partners (business and nonprofit partners for example) strategic and reliable (tested) insights for leading and negotiating meaningful reforms in such a dynamic system--so that reforms can evolve to scale and generate a wide enough base of support and buy-in for long term improvement and success?
Looking and Listening Past the "Noise" of School Reform Supermen and School Reform Charlatans...
Reformers and innovators came with differing motivations, differing backgrounds and fields of knowledge, experience, and expertise, differing levels of financial strength, differing external partners and technological innovations to apply, but most ended with no measurable, sustained results...driving only mediocre or incremental improvements in student learning and unlocking no indispensable "fix," no essential "key" to wide scale change and innovation in schools, no models for wide scale replication...
Public education is a legendary graveyard for ambitious philanthropic plans.Hall, L.S. and Callahan, D. "It's One of the Biggest Failures Yet in K-12 Philanthropy. What Are the Lessons?" Inside Philanthropy July 5, 2018
Alas, no Superman...
There is reason for pessimism, as we've just seen...There is some reason for alarm too: in many places, especially the deeply rural or highly urban, kids are falling through the cracks in large numbers. It's worth noting, though, that in many of these cases, the school systems themselves are serving communities, are part of communities, beset by protracted societal ills of all sorts--low parent education levels, poverty, crime, blight and pollution, violence, racial discrimination, lack of adequate health care, single parent homes...Now, there are examples to be found, here and there, of a school district or school building that "succeeds" relative to such odds, but their existence doesn't mean the odds themselves are still not daunting.
Is there good news?...
There are many school districts doing a solid job of educating students with improving levels of student achievement despite the fact that the academic bar is being raised higher because of the new national standards and because of higher expectations with regard to work readiness in our technology-based economy. And, despite concerns about how US students rank internationally, the US continues to draw foreign students to its soil, and in terms of economics, business, and innovation, the US remains the envy of the world.And the emerging good news is that some current models of wide-scale successful reform (albeit limited in number) are providing valuable insights into process-focused school innovation frameworks that focus on strategies and principles for cultivating adaptive and resilient school cultures.
I call these new road maps "constitutional" frameworks because they deliver not prescribed instructional methods but instead reliable guidelines for creating and cultivating school cultures that foster capacity building, accountability, and shared leadership around a shared core mission that embraces, and can successfully sustain, meaningful innovation.
These frameworks not only enlighten school leaders...They also underline the essential role of external partners in successful school reform. They help these school allies--education sector B2B companies and nonprofit education advocates-- understand the challenges of large school systems and in order to partner more effectively with each level in the system.
The genius of these frameworks, in light of so many failed initiatives in the past, is their focus on the transformation of school culture first and foremost, in order to build dynamic school cultures that can embrace innovation. They discourage fragmentation and unite overlapping levels of larger school systems around, and measure their success in terms of, core educational outcomes: learning and student achievement, work readiness, and student health, character, and well being.Instead of forming bulwarks against the external storms raging around them, these transformed school cultures cultivate educators who value and derive value from engaged and lasting collaborations with the families they serve, with other innovative and dedicated education professionals (wherever they find them, including those in "competing" districts, in "competing" schools within a district, in charter or conventional schools...) and with other external networks--with B2B education and technology leaders, with political leaders, with nonprofit partners and community advocates.Sound like an exciting time for leading educational change and partnering with schools?...
EdPro Communications looks forward to helping interested education sector B2B enterprises and education sector nonprofit advocates maintain an informative edge with additional posts and reports on the landscape for school change and innovation...Stay tuned!