Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

All Systems Go!

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I hear people talking about the need for “systems change” and “systems thinking,” and when I do I always wonder what people mean when they say it.

My own interest in systems thinking began a few years ago when I read Peter Senge’s classic The 5th Discipline. It influenced me so much that I dedicated a full chapter to the subject in my new book American Schools. Overall, though, I haven’t seen a lot of work in education based on systems thinking. But that seems to be changing.

I’m particularly excited about Michael Fullan’s new book, All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform, which I just finished and highly recommend. Not surprisingly, the book begins with a foreword from Senge, who grounds the origins of our current system in the Industrial era. “That’s why they were organized like an assembly line,” he writes. “That’s why they were based on standardized timetables governing each part of the day (complete with bells and whistles on the walls), and fixed, rigid curricula delivered by teachers whose job was first and foremost to maintain control, much like an assembly-line foreman.” Senge urges us to imagine a very different challenge today. “The challenge of our time is not economic competitiveness. The challenge is to build not only “sustainable” but also regenerative societies — ones than enhance natural and social capital.”

Amen. And in the pages that follow, Fullan shows how that work is taking place in a number of different places around the world. He cuts to the chase on page one: “If there is one thing you should remember  . . . it is the concept of collective capacity,” which Fullan defines as “generating the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

Fullan says, and I agree, that collective capacity is the hidden resource we fail to understand or cultivate. Instead, we overvalue single-resource strategies — making smaller classrooms, raising salaries, drafting common standards, etc. — when what we need is an investment in compound resource strategies. Smaller classrooms mean nothing, after all, unless the move is coordinated with relevant professional learning for teachers that helps them employ new teaching strategies. And adding national standards will mean nothing if the end result is merely more national exams and less high-quality locally driven assessments using the standards as a common frame. But this is what we do, over and over again. We’re playing a game of chess as though it’s checkers, making one move at a time.

This does NOT mean that all we need to do is give people more opportunities to collaborate. What Michelle Rhee understands, I think correctly, is that collaboration, or student voice, or democratic governance, is not an end in itself (as I alluded to in a previous post titled, “To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?”) What is required instead, and what Rhee fails to grasp, is disciplined, strategically-employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (and, by extension, adults). As Fullan writes: “Quality instruction requires getting a small number of practices right. These practices involve knowing clearly and specifically what each student can or cannot do, followed by tailored intervention that engages students in the particular learning in question, and then does the assessment-instruction-correction process on a continuous basis.”

Fullan provides myriad examples throughout the book, but a particularly illustrative one comes from Ontario, where government officials realized they needed to provide resolute leadership on some core priorities that could impact not just the government education agencies, but also district and local school leaders. The government realized that if it wanted to engage the whole system in a coherent, focused effort, it needed to do three things:

  1. focus on a small number of ambitious instructional goals
  2. create an instructional capacity capability to help coordinate the efforts of the many players (government, district and local ed leaders)
  3. change the culture of the state education ministry so that it had greater internal coherence and a commitment to work in a true two-way partnership

As someone living in DC, I read Fullan’s case study of Ontario and saw an immediate disconnect between what they did and where we’re headed. In particular, check out this quote:

The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.

To me, that last word sums up why I worry that Michelle Rhee will not be able to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts. In work this massive and important, how we speak, and not just what we say, matters greatly. (This is what I was trying to get at in my recent review of the new film The Lottery as well.) Fullan’s book convincingly demonstrates that systemic reform is difficult but possible. It also demonstrates, once again, that until the tenor of our national conversation suggests a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain agonizingly out of reach.

How to Start a Movement, Part II

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Last week, I shared a video from TED about how to start a movement.

This Tuesday, my wife and I went to see the new movie Cyrus, and I watched the exact same principle unfold again. See for yourself (the clip is less than two minutes long, and it’s funny):

As with the TED video, John C. Reilly’s character demonstrates the guts of a leader by taking to the dance floor before any of his fellow party-goers were ready to join in. He could have crashed and burned — but Marisa Tomei’s character saves him, and starts to seed a movement by becoming his first follower. This gives the leader credibility — but only because he embraces her as an equal, which creates the space for others to join in as well. And then, sure enough, and shortly thereafter, a tipping point occurs and the whole energy of the party shifts.(Thank you once again, Human League.)

The scene has all the essential conditions of what defines a successful movement: a brave leader, a first follower who is embraced as an equal, and then, once the third and fourth people join in, a shift in the environmental conditions occurs that allows others to feel safe enough to join in as well. The clip is also a reminder that while it takes a leader to break the seal and roll back the rug at a house party, the first person to join in is really the one who seeds the possibility of a truly memorable evening.

In our field of public education, who, I wonder are the leaders capable of inducing first followers to start something bigger — and do so by embracing them as equals? And which first followers are most likely to bring others to a party (i.e., transformational movement in public education) that is actually FUN, assets-based and productive, and not, like so many current conversations in the field, depressing, deficit-based, and cartoonish in their simplicity?

What No One Else Will Say About Teach for America

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There’s an interesting debate unfolding on the New York Times web site today around this question: Does Teach for America Improve the Teaching Profession?

Unfortunately, too many of the featured contributors — who have sparked hundreds of readers to offer their own feedback — chose to cast TFA in one of two terms: as either the White Knight of education reform (e.g., Donna Foote’s “A Corps of True Reformers”) or as the down-n-dirty Devil himself (e.g., Margaret Crocco’s “A Threat to Public Schools”).

As I wrote last week, in a piece titled “What Gandhi would think of The Lottery“, this sort of polarized rhetoric is the latest iteration of the “I/It” way of seeing public education, and it will get us nowhere. So as someone who neither loves nor hates TFA, let me offer a succinct summary of how I see them, since no one seems to want to acknowledge the fuller picture of what they represent:

First, the good news: TFA is closer to a key recipe for systems improvement than any other entity in either the traditional or alternative teacher certification route — they have figured out how to make their program among the most highly competitive in the country. As the Times reported earlier in the week, 18% of Yale’s most recent crop of seniors applied to TFA — nearly one out of every five graduates — and 46,359 candidates across the country applied for just 4,500 spots.

It may seem odd to praise TFA via the research of Linda Darling-Hammond, but LDH’s most recent book, The Flat World and Education, cites as a key component of the Finnish success story its ability to raise the competitiveness of its teacher preparation programs (which now accept only ~15% of those who apply). So we should all celebrate — and learn from — TFA’s ability to attract so many bright and passionate young people to a profession that still scores low on the prestige scale.

Now, the bad news: One thing TFA does NOT do that has also been essential to Finland’s success is invest deeply in preparing teachers for a research-based professional career. Finland’s teachers don’t drink from a fire hose and then inherit a classroom of high-needs children — their preparation includes both extensive (and excellent) coursework on how to teach, and a full year of clinical experience in a school associated with their university of study.

This is not a foreign concept in the United States — it’s called medical school. Or law school (with its summer internships). Or just about any other graduate degree that’s designed to prepare people for a top profession. Which gets us to the crux of the problem with TFA — on the whole it takes us further from, not closer to, the establishment of teaching as a truly prestigious profession, rather than merely a noble way to gain valuable experience as an individual on the evolving path of twenty-something life. We would never tolerate Doctors for America in our most overused emergency rooms. We would never send Architects for America to Haiti to experiment on earthquake-resistant housing design. Why then do we not only embrace the concept of placing our smartest and least experienced teachers before our neediest children, but go even further and suggest that the TFA model is actually what all teacher preparation should look like?

To be fair, part of the void that was filled by TFA existed because so many of our graduate education programs are, well, sucky. And until they change and get better, we can’t begin to aspire to the sorts of transformations other countries have been able to bring about.

If we really value learning and teaching, as Finland and other countries do, we need to invest deeply in the creation of a true long-term teaching profession, and not just a short-term teaching force. That means both traditional and alternative certification programs need to raise their game. And while TFA has much to teach the field about attracting the best and the brightest to our nation’s classrooms, until it revises its preparation model it will unintentionally perpetuate the illusion that reforming our education system simply means smarter, younger teachers. It’s just not that simple. And we can do better.

The Inspired Mindset — Starting a School, Part III

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This morning, over orange juice, coffee and red grapes in the theater room of the Capital City Public Charter School, a small group of interested educators, scholars and citizens listened as Center for Inspired Teaching’s Director of Teaching and Learning, Julie Sweetland, explained what makes the Center’s work so powerful.

Inspired Teaching is the entity most responsible for the new charter school (scheduled opening Fall 2011) for which I currently serve as Board Chair. And the event allowed Sweetland, an articulate and charismatic spokesperson, to clarify what distinguishes her organization from other alternative certification programs in the city, and nationwide. “Over the past 15 years,” she explained, “our work with thousands of educators has helped us learn more about what it takes to be an inspired teacher. That works begins with our search for people with an inspired mindset — we want builders, and people who are excited by confronting new challenges in their work, not blockers, or people who would rather do what they’ve always done.”

Sweetland went on to define the three central tensions Inspired Teaching wants its teachers, and staff, to be aware of. “The first is balancing the tension between radical creativity and structured execution,” she said. “The second is balancing the need to be both nurturing and impact-driven. And the third is maintaining an approach that allows for both decentralization and integration.”

One of the participants asked her to elaborate. “We believe that a healthy learning environment must have all of the following: Autonomy (for both the teachers and, occasionally, the students as well); Belonging; Connectedness; Developmentally-appropriate activities; and Engaging learning opportunities. And all of our work is geared towards helping teachers do each of those things at the highest level.”

I urge all of you to learn more about Center for Inspired Teaching. Check out their web site, and let me know what you think of their philosophy. Our hope is that, beginning in 2011, the Inspired Teaching School can begin serving as a catalytic force of change in the city, and spur other schools to invest in the capacity of teachers to keep placing a high priority on student achievement and mastery of challenging material — and stop doing so at the expense of sharpening students’ creativity and intellectual curiosity.

The Testing Carousel Goes Round and Round . . .

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Today’s Washington Post reports that the test scores of elementary school kids slipped this year after two successive years of growth, “a setback to Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee as she seeks to overhaul the city’s schools.”

No doubt, this news is being used by Rhee’s critics to point out that her particular brand of reform can’t bring the city the lasting change in its public schools that everyone desires. Meanwhile, Rhee responded to the news with equanimity. “We like to celebrate when we do well, and when we don’t, we have to take responsibility,” she said. “We have to own this and figure out how to move forward.”

Can I please make a wish to the education fairy and ask that this be the last of this sort of story I ever see? For those of us who believe that the best way to assess a school’s overall health involves a balanced scorecard of assessments, we can’t have it both ways — you can’t criticize Rhee for focusing on tests, and then lambaste her when those same scores are poor. It either is or isn’t a viable way to assess the health of a school.

In that same spirit, why aren’t folks like Rhee proactively diffusing these sorts of stories by getting out in front of the curve and releasing their own bundle of assessment measures, as a way to diffuse the potential power of the test scores when viewed in isolation? Rhee could do this immediately, without even getting into the contentious issue of using performance assessments. The city could stitch together an interim scorecard, made up entirely of existing measures (student and faculty absenteeism rates, student disciplinary data, graduation rates, a balanced set of course offerings, school climate surveys, and yes, test scores) and use it to educate the public about the many elements that go into a high-quality learning environment? Depending on what the data tell us, it might even lead to some insights that could drive future policy proposals. So let’s stop bickering over the wrong thing — otherwise, we’ll be stuck interminably on this basic-skills testing carousel, and forced to watch it go round and round while other countries are actively revising their education systems to become more effective at imparting higher-order skills and preparing children for the 21st century.

We can do better.

How to Build a School System That Nurtures Creativity

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In case you missed it, there’s an important new piece in Newsweek about the declining capacity of Americans to think creatively — and what we can do about it.

This is, of course, the primary issue that has driven Sir Ken Robinson’s work (if you’re among the few who haven’t yet seen his hilarious and insightful 2006 TED talk on the subject, check it out). As Ken puts it, the problem is that our current system of education is more apt to “mine our minds” of its most precious materials than it is to plant fertile seeds that can sprout new ideas and ways of seeing the world. The Newsweek piece picks up on this theme, noting that “around the world, other countries are making creativity development a national priority.” Meanwhile, our focus in the U.S. remains on clarifying what exactly we need to put into all children’s minds, rather than how we can best pull out their individual talents and passions.

In addition to what Newsweek outlines as constructive steps to address the creativity crisis (hint: cognitive science and a deeper understanding of how the brain really works), I’d like to remind everyone what Finland did to become the world’s leader in public education: an intensive investment in teacher education (NOT performance pay), and a complete overhaul of the curriculum and assessment system in order to create a true “thinking curriculum” for all students.

More specifically, teachers in Finland receive 2 or 3 years of high-quality training completely at state expense. The program is extremely competitive, and it is followed by a full year of clinical experience and studying under a master teacher. All teachers also engage in critical friends group work throughout their careers, ensuring that they engage in continual self-reflection, evaluation, and proactive efforts to improve the quality of their professional practice.

The result of this deep investment in teaching, and in a curriculum that is focused on inquiry (as opposed to facts)? A learning environment that encourages both students and teachers to try new ideas and methods, learn about and through innovations, and cultivate creativity in schools. As Linda Darling-Hammond says in her excellent new book The Flat World and Education, “Over the past 40 years, Finland has shifted from a highly centralized system emphasizing external testing to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curriculum around very lean national standards. . . . The logic of the system is that investments in the capacity of local teachers and schools to meet the needs of all students, coupled with the thoughtful guidance about goals, can unleash the benefits of local creativity in the cause of common, equitable outcomes.”

Why can’t we do this? WHY AREN’T WE DOING THIS?

Data-Driven Decision Making . . . and Soccer?

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Great timing.

A week after I wrote about what the World Cup can teach us about school reform, the New York Times published an article about the growing push for more detailed data in the relatively data-free world of professional soccer.

I am not, for what it’s worth, against the use of more sophisticated data in making decisions about how to improve the learning conditions for kids (or, for that matter, how to make better decisions on the soccer pitch). Who would be? In fact, I’ve written in the past about how a balanced scorecard in schools would help educators do their jobs more effectively.

That being said, I am very much against the glorification of data as a way to make extremely subjective, non-linear things — like learning how to use one’s mind well, or watching a collective burst of creativity and synchronicity that leads to a beautiful soccer goooooooaaaaaaal — into extremely objective, linear things for which we can appropriately plan and script out a desired, predictable response.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this new push for soccer data is reported the same week as an announcement in my home city that Chancellor Michelle Rhee intends to significantly expand the use of standardized tests so that “every D.C. student from kindergarten through high school is regularly assessed to measure academic progress and the effectiveness of teachers.” What’s afoot in both instances is, on one hand, the (appropriate) desire to take human ingenuity and apply it to situations that in the past have lacked specificity, and, on the other, the (inappropriate) effort to make everything quantifiable, resulting in an overreliance on that which can be measured — at the expense of everything else.

Notably, the push for soccer data seems far more measured than what I see in education. According to Mark Brunkhart, the president of a company that provides soccer data for a fee to clubs and news organizations, he and his staff do not blindly evangelize statistics. Every month or two, he says, he gets a call from a professor or graduate student who is a rabid soccer fan and just finished Moneyball, the book that brought sabermetrics into the mainstream in 2003. (I wrote about Moneyball and its potentially positive implications for school reform in a 2009 column titled “What Would Theo Do?”)

“Every single one comes with the idea that they’re going to solve soccer with the ‘Moneyball’ approach,” Brunkhart said, “and I try to talk them all down.” Similarly, the president of the Society for American Baseball Research pointed to Miroslav Klose’s second goal in Germany’s 4-0 victory against Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals as an example of how statistics seem to overlook the nuance and elegance of soccer. “A series of three or four absolutely beautiful passes — how do you capture that?” he said. “It’s just the nature of the game.”

Would that I were seeing similar restraint among our education leaders. As longtime educator Ted Sizer once said, “Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.”

What Gandhi Would Think of “The Lottery”

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I just saw “The Lottery” – a documentary film about public education in general, and the charter school movement in particular – and I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.

The film is beautiful, and deeply moving, It is impossible not to fall in love with the four children (and their families) whose bittersweet paths we follow in the lead-up to the lottery that decides who is admitted to Harlem Success Academy, a successful new charter school, and whose dream is (randomly) denied.

I’m equally struck by the way the film further entrenches the “us v. them” mentality that is, I believe, one of the greatest challenges to our establishing a new system of public education that can truly serve the interests of the families in the film.

Continue reading this post.