Tag: New York Times

How can we ensure better teacher quality?

Posted on | by Sam

I’m a big fan of the New York Times’ Room for Debate series, in which a central question is asked of five different folks.

Today, the question was about how to ensure and improve teacher quality. And although they didn’t ask me, here’s what I would have said:

The problem — and the solution — has to do with the way teachers are currently trained and prepared for the classroom. Most teacher preparation programs, whether they’re public universities or private organizations, still act as though what matters most is subject expertise and behavioral management skills.  Those things do matter, of course, yet most of the new teachers I know have said they felt unprepared for the actual challenges of the classroom, and for understanding how to meet the myriad needs of her students. As a result, it’s typical to hear stories of young teachers spending late nights reading books or searching for resources online – a result of the sizable disconnect between our theories and their realities.

The amount of turnover most schools endure is also anathema to the establishment of a healthy, sustainable culture. Take the two schools I spent a year observing for my most recent book, Our School. Bancroft Elementary lost an average of 25% of its faculty every year, and Mundo Verde’s inaugural staff was almost entirely made up of first- or second-year teachers. More significantly, by the time Our School was released, only one of the four teachers I wrote about – Mundo Verde’s Berenice Pernalete – was still teaching at the same school. Rebecca Lebowitz is now in Boston, getting her PhD; Molly Howard is there now, too, helping set up the elementary school program for a charter school in the Expeditionary Learning network; and Rebecca Schmidt is now working at a non-profit in D.C. It’s encouraging that all four of these talented women still work in education – and it’s notable that the reason three of them left their previous posts was because each felt it had become impossible to do the job effectively and sustainably. And no wonder, when one considers that teachers today are being asked to customize their instruction for every individual child, and do so with minimal experience or relevant training. “If you are a student in an American classroom today,” writes Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, “the odds that you will be assigned to an inexperienced teacher are higher than they have ever been. In fact, right now there are more first-year teachers in American classrooms than teachers at any other experience level.”

The response to this “capacity gap” is not to stop hiring the young teachers or keep employing the old ones, but to start ensuring that all teachers can diagnose and meet the developmental needs of every child. And the good news is there are already valuable models we can look to as our guides.

Take America’s medical schools. As any M.D. knows, different schools have different strengths and weaknesses. But one thing every medical school shares is the belief that a strong medical training is built on a dual foundation of two courses: anatomy and physiology.

In education, no similar consensus exists. Worse still, most programs give short shrift to the two most important things a teacher needs to know: how children learn, and how they develop.

Think about that for a second. Our country’s teacher training programs, by and large, pay little attention to how well prospective teachers understand the emotional and developmental needs of the children they propose to teach. But there’s nothing preventing teacher-training programs from adapting the Medical School model – as Yale University’s James Comer has suggested – and establishing a similar two-course foundation for all prospective educators: Developmental Sciences, which would give teachers a foundation in the cognitive, social, emotional, ethical, physical, and linguistic needs of children; and Learning Sciences, which would give teachers a solid foundation in understanding how people learn.

Meanwhile, to better support the millions of teachers who are already in classrooms across the country, we must craft evaluation programs that honor the art and science of teaching. One of the few things all sides seem to agree on is that teacher evaluation systems are in need of an extreme makeover; for too long, they’ve been little more than pro forma stamps of approval, and they’ve done little to nothing to help teachers get better.

In too many places, however, efforts are underway to craft systems that disregard the art of teaching in favor of the (misunderstood) science of measurement. These sorts of systems are more about pushing people out than lifting them up, and they continue to act as though the intellectual growth of students (and a narrow definition of it at that) is the preeminent measure of an effective teacher.

We should blow them all up and start over.

A prerequisite of any evaluation system should be its capacity to help teachers improve the quality of their professional practice via shared, strategic inquiry into what is and isn’t working for children in their classrooms. These new systems shouldn’t be afraid of quantitative reports, just as they shouldn’t devalue qualitative measures. And they should assess teachers by their effectiveness to support children across the entire developmental continuum.

There are several illustrative efforts underway. If you’re a policymaker, take a close look at what they’re doing in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a program called Peer Assistance Review, or PAR, uses senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. And if you’re a teacher, consider getting certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (nbpts.org), a teacher-run organization that uses a performance-based, multiple-measure, peer-reviewed process to identify and acknowledge the definitive standards of accomplished teaching and the process by which the profession can certify whether or not a teacher meets those standards.

It will always be true, in teaching and in the natural world, that not everything can be measured, just as it’s true that there are ways to measure aspects of teaching and learning that go a lot deeper than basic-skills test scores. The challenge is to find the balance between the elusive but evergreen art of teaching, and the emerging but illustrative science of the brain.

We can do both. And we can start immediately.

A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on A School is Not a Pet. And Yet . . .

This weekend’s story in the New York Times about former NFL star Deion Sanders’ struggling charter school lays bare much of what’s wrong with the way Americans think about public education in general, and charter schools in particular.

The story begins with Sanders being approached with a “splendid business proposition,” “deep-pocketed backers,” and a state board of education that “fell over itself” to accommodate one of the greatest pro football players of all time.

Never mind the fact that being a great NFL cornerback has nothing to do with knowing how to build a great school. Unless, of course, the only goal for the school is to become an athletic powerhouse, in which case, hey, do your thing.

You can already guess how the rest of the story goes. A rapid rise in the national sports rankings. Televised games on ESPN. A steady infusion of uniforms and equipment. And a near-complete inattention to the things that actually determine a healthy school.

As one former member of Prime Prep’s board put it, parents were seduced by the promise that under Sanders’ tutelage, their children would get athletic scholarships to college and, eventually, pro contracts. “The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”

It gets worse. In a recording obtained by The Dallas Observer, Sanders explains to a colleague how the school came to be. “Senators, political leaders that you hooked me up with, that you put me down with — that’s how we got the school. You’re talking about a nigger sitting up there that was an athlete who didn’t graduate, another nigger sitting up there saying he’s the president, that ain’t graduate nothing, and we got a school. Think about that, man.

“How in the world do you think we got a school?”

How indeed. And although the Texas Education Agency has vowed to revoke the school’s charter, the toxic mix that birthed it in the first place – our celebrity-worshipping culture, and our endemic disrespect for both the teaching profession and young black and brown children – has already spread far and wide.

Let me say that again: Deion Sanders is right. What allowed a school like Prime Prep to come into being at all was a particularly American combination of celebrity worship, disrespect for teachers, and racist indifference to the plight of minority boys and girls.

To be clear, the space for innovation that charter school laws have allowed has led to many outstanding schools, many of which I have written about and will continue to hold up as examples of what’s possible in American public education. But it has also laid bare a widespread myopic belief that starting a school is a lot like raising a pet: provide enough love (cash), food (connections) and water (shiny stuff), and the rest will take care of itself. And yet schools are not puppies; they are complex systems of human beings with incredibly nonlinear, complex tasks to complete: the holistic development and growth of every child in the building, over the course of several formative, complicated, emotionally loaded years. A school like Prime Prep, with its naïve belief that the other parts of a school could be faked in order to engender nationally ranked sports teams, underscores this point well.

A big part of what makes this possible is our historic, and growing, disrespect for the teaching profession, and for the (few) men and (many) women who make it their life’s work. Teacher/blogger Jose Vilson has made this point numerous times, most notably in response to one of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s repeated public excoriations of female teachers. “As Christie wags a finger at this woman,” Vilson writes, “the crowd cheers, signaling a societal acknowledgment that politicians can lay waste to any courtesy towards anyone, and that democracy is overrated. Surely, dissenters get jeers at any rally, but this particular type of jeer further solidified the idea that teachers’ rights are aligned with women’s rights.

“None of this othering happens without society’s consent,” he argues. “Aside from Christie’s ego, gender plays a huge role here, and if you can’t see that, then perhaps you’re part of the problem, too.”

Of course, this isn’t just about the devaluing of women in American life; it’s about the devaluing of minorities too, especially young black men. How else to explain the senseless murder this weekend of Michael Brown, a college-bound 18-year-old who was shot ten times by a local policeman – a killing that marks only the most recent example of such a tragedy, one that extends not just to Trayvon Martin, but all the way back to Emmett Till and beyond.

These cultural flash points and news reports should be electric jolts to the system, and to all of us who exist inside the bubble together, in order to underscore just how much work we have to do as a society to transcend the historical baggage we have accrued over the past two centuries.

There is a reason our society has coined the “Those that can” line about teachers, while other countries have afforded the profession their greatest levels of respect.

There is a reason the U.S. houses 25% of the world’s prisoners, despite representing just 5% of the world’s population.

There is a reason almost half of those prisoners, 150 years after the end of slavery, have black skin – and that reason is not because of an innate pathology or proclivity for violence.

And there is a reason that so many of the most celebrated new pedagogies for poor children have never been piloted in the schools of children of privilege.

Simply put, we are anchored by troublesome mindsets that are difficult to shake off: What is good for us would not work for them. What they do in the present has nothing to do with what we have done in the past. And what they do for a living proves that they are not capable of doing anything more.

These thoughts are not unrelated. They are a huge barrier to our ongoing dream of a society that can provide greater equity and social opportunity. And they are chains we will never break until we’re willing, collectively and courageously, to reckon publicly with the world that we have wrought, and the ideas about one another we continue to carry.

This is Your Brain on Test Scores

Posted on | by Sam

There are two seemingly unrelated columns in today’s Opinion page of the New York Times that provide a crisp summary of where we stand in our current thinking about school reform — and where we need to go.

The first is a piece about charter schools in New York City, in which the editors reference “a national study finding that only 17 percent of charter schools offered students a better education, as measured by test scores, and that an astounding 37 percent offered a worse one.”

This is not the first time the Times has uncritically conflated something as comprehensive as “a better education” with something as singular as student reading and math scores. I imagine it won’t be the last. But it is, thankfully, a funhouse-mirror brand of “business thinking” that is on its death bed. Indeed, it hasn’t characterized actual business thinking for decades — ever since Robert Kaplan’s notion of the balanced scorecard first demonstrated the danger of focusing too narrowly on net income as a metric of overall success.

As I have said repeatedly, reading and math scores are valuable — and overvalued. Even KIPP, the poster child for exponential test score growth in high-poverty environments, recognized this when, a year ago, it shared the results of its own study that showed just a 33% college completion rate for its graduates. Since that time, as Paul Tough reports in his new book, KIPP has rightfully sought to round out its own portrait of a successful graduate by identifying a set of actual skills and habits its young people can use to successfully navigate the awaiting worlds of college, career and citizenship.

Ironically, neuroscientist David Eagleman calls for a similarly comprehensive vision on the same Op-Ed page. Writing about President Obama’s recent decision to invest in a multiyear effort to map the human brain, Eagleman makes a series of statements the Times editors would be wise to apply to their own thinking about school reform. “You can’t pull a piece of circuitry out of your smartphone and expect the phone to function,” he writes. “Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons simultaneously.”

What excites Eagleman is the potential to understand the brain as a system, and not just as a series of isolated parts. “While we have improved our ability to diagnose problems,” he writes, “we have yet to understand how to remedy them.”

The same can be said for our efforts to diagnose which school provides the “better education.” Now we just need to courage to admit it.

The World is . . . a Sisyphean Hill of Policy Smackdowns?

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on The World is . . . a Sisyphean Hill of Policy Smackdowns?

As a former teacher with a MBA, I read a lot of “business books.” And of the titles I’ve read over the past few years, none have characterized the future of public education more presciently than Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read an Op-Ed in this weekend’s New York Times in which Friedman abandons the nascent non-hierarchical plains of the twenty-first century for the familiar twentieth-century terrain of command-and-control. Yet there it is – and there he is – writing about the future of school reform, and praising the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.

First, let’s recall what Friedman described in The World is Flat – the dawn of collaboration and the demise of top-down politics. As he wrote, “We are now just at the beginning of a massive, worldwide change in habits. . . from command and control to connect and collaborate.” In that world, “the most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn,’” and the only way that sort of shift will come about is by “having an abundance of trust.” Friedman quotes a wide range of experts to strengthen his claims, including foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, who, though speaking of geopolitics, might as well have been talking about school reform. “People change as a result of what they notice,” Mandelbaum said, “not just what they are told.”

Which leads us to this weekend’s column, and Friedman’s praise for the Obama administration’s support of a vision of “educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals,” and for an education secretary who trumpets reforms that “have already showed double-digit increases in reading or math in their first year” without realizing the only thing those sorts of numerical gains accurately reflect are the funhouse-mirror state of our modern discourse.

What Friedman seems to have forgotten, and what the Obama administration has repeatedly failed to heed, is that systems as dysfunctional as those in American public education require more than a new set of end goals: they require deep and sustained investments in our collective capacity to imagine and sustain something new – and that sort of change requires two main ingredients: technical expertise and emotional commitment.

Unfortunately, Race to the Top (RTTT) lacks both ingredients: its formulas for technical expertise, such as new teacher evaluation systems (good idea) based significantly on student test scores (bad idea), move the goalposts but ignore the skill levels of the players. As international change expert Michael Fullan points out, RTTT “pays little or no attention to developing the capacity of leaders to improve together or as a system: it is based on a failed theory that teacher quality can be increased by a system of competitive rewards, and it rests on a badly flawed model of management where everyone manages their own unit, is accountable for results, and competes with their peers – creating fiefdoms, silos, and lack of capacity or incentives for professionals to help each other” – in short, the sorts of habits Friedman defines as the key to becoming successful in the flat world of the twenty-first century.

Worse still, programs like RTTT reflect a technocratic insensitivity to the actual rhythms of human beings, and a complete disregard for the necessity of building a shared emotional commitment for the changes we seek (Chicago, anyone?). So whereas attaching a dollar sign to the “recommended” reforms of RTTT was an effective strategy, as was tying each state’s conditional funding under ARRA to its agreement to adopt the common core learning standards, it’s equally true that there are short games and there are long games. And what I loved about The World is Flat was its recognition that to win the long game of the current century, compulsion was fool’s gold; commitment was the gold standard.

In fairness to Mr. Friedman, this point was made long before him. As Plato said, a loooong time ago, “Knowledge, which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind.”

The sooner we heed that advice, the better.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Hey Tom — When it Comes to Ed Reform, China is the Least of Our Worries

Posted on | by Sam

Tom Friedman has a new column about education in today’s New York Times in which he almost makes an important point about the state of K-12 schooling in America, and what we can do to improve it.

The thing Friedman gets right is the easy part — the fact that despite the willingness of American politicians to keep beating the xenophobic drums and lead the chant for everything to be “made in America,” American businesses are already operating in the flat world of globalization and cost efficiency. Consequently, Friedman writes, “the trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over.” In other words, if you aren’t uniquely skilled to succeed in the modern world, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be back looking for work.

Fair enough. But then Friedman shifts to talk about international scores on the PISA test, and America’s consistent mediocrity vis a vis the rest of the world. Then he quotes the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, who asks us to “imagine, in a few years, [that] you could sign onto a Web site and see this is how my school compares with a similar school anywhere in the world.” According to Schleicher, parents could then “take this information to your local superintendent and ask: ‘Why are we not doing as well as schools in China or Finland?’”

I’m sorry, what?

Don’t get me wrong — in the modern world of school choice, parents need more and better ways to compare schools, and the PISA is probably the best test out there for gauging the overall health of a nation’s educational quality (largely because its questions tend to be more open-ended and challenging than the U.S. versions, which are often straight multiple-choice). I’d even bet Schleicher envisions that when American parents learn, say, that Finland has a completely different approach to teacher recruitment and development, they will start demanding that we abandon our crisis response to the teaching shortage (i.e. Teach for America) and devise our own Marshall Plan for teaching.

I’d also love it if that happened. But it never will if our lead vehicle is little more than a web site that helps parents compare America’s PISA scores to China’s.

Why? Because America needs to have another conversation first — the one that actually clarifies what we now know about how people learn.

The good news is . . . we know a lot. More than ever before, we can assemble a picture of the ways our brains respond to and make sense of information. We can help people diagnose their individual strengths and weaknesses. And we can offer models of schooling that previous generations could only dream about — models in which children not only love going to school, but actually acquire relevant skills and understandings about themselves and the world.

The bad news is we aren’t having that conversation, and we aren’t elevating those stories. We talk about “achievement” as though it’s a proxy for “learning,” when in fact it’s a proxy for “3rd and 8th grade reading and math scores.” We propose incentive structures for adults that ignore what we know about how motivation works in human beings. And we propose comparing schools to other ones around the world before we actually understand what a healthy and high-functioning school really looks like — and requires.

What Schleicher envisions is right in spirit: a comparison platform that would empower parents, principals and teachers to demand something better. Until we deepen our collective capacity to imagine something bigger than the world of schooling the rest of us experienced, however, all a platform like that will do is improve our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

In Defense of the Department of Education, Diplomacy and . . . Defense

Posted on | by Sam

Two unrelated articles in yesterday’s New York Times – one about the ostensible decline of influence in American geopolitics, and the other about the ostensible rise of autism in American schoolchildren – have led me to consider a radical proposal:

Let’s merge the Departments of Education, State and Defense.

Georgetown professor of foreign policy Charles Kupchan indirectly argued for such blasphemy when he noted the ways in which the landscape of modern diplomacy is shifting uneasily beneath our once-sturdy Western feet. Pointing to the nascent revolutions in the Middle East, the success of state capitalism in China and Russia, and the growth of left-wing populism in India and Brazil, Kupchan illustrates the ways in which “rising nations are fashioning their own versions of modernity and pushing back against the West’s ideological ambitions. As this century unfolds,” he argues, “multiple power centers, and the competing models they represent, will vie on a more level playing field. Effective global governance will require forging common ground amid an equalizing distribution of power and rising ideological diversity.”

In foreign policy circles, Kupchan’s observation is not a new one. Just a year ago, two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff anonymously released a Pentagon report (published under the nom de plume of “Mr. Y.”) in which they questioned America’s ongoing willingness to overvalue its military might, and undervalue its young people.  “By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans,” they argued, “we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future.” In a subsequent article for Foreign Policy, Center for American Progress scholar John Norris sang a similar tune: “The key to sustaining our competitive edge, at home or on the world stage,” he wrote, “is credibility – and credibility . . . requires engagement, strength, and reliability – imaginatively applied through the national tools of development, diplomacy, and defense.

Meanwhile, in the same section of the paper, journalist Amy Harmon reported that one in 88 American children are now diagnosed with some form of autism. While not everyone agrees about the root cause for the spike in numbers, Thomas Frazier, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Autism, thinks it’s an accurate reflection of modern society. “Our world is such a social world,” he said. “I don’t care if you have a 150 I.Q., if you have a social problem, that’s a real problem. You’re going to have problems getting along with your boss, with your spouse, with friends.”

Drawing a link between these two articles may feel like a stretch until you consider that the central problem in both stems from the same troubling source: our systemic inability to make deep and lasting sense of the perspective of others. In fact, there’s a growing theory in the scientific community that autism is the result of an early developmental failure of mirror neurons – the cells in the brain most responsible for allowing us to imagine (and empathize with) the thoughts and feelings of others. This theory may help explain why the greater the impairment in an individual on the autism spectrum, the greater the likelihood that individual will fixate on objects, not people. And it may help explain why some of the most promising new treatments involve little more than non-autistic adults imitating the behavior of autistic children. As UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni explains, “When the therapist imitates his patients, he may activate their mirror neurons, which in turn may help the patients to see their therapist, literally.”

What both articles underscore is how badly we need to invest in our collective capacity to see the world, and each other, more clearly. Kupchan’s characterizations about the changing landscape of geopolitics echo Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of more than 50 years ago, in his final formal act as commander-in-chief, when the five-star general suggested that the most promising path to peace rests in “learn[ing] how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” And Harmon’s report on the rise of autism speaks to a larger deficit in our society – a deficit we have partly fueled by putting the knowledge cart before the emotional horse for so long. Indeed, whereas the 20th century cast the quest for global harmony as a black and white battle between neatly categorized competitors, the 21st century playing field is shrouded in overlapping shades of gray. To negotiate such a surface effectively, we need citizens endowed with a different set of habits and skills – ones more aligned with what Tom Friedman famously called the end of the “command and control” system of organization, and the beginning of the “connect and collaborate” approach.

For these reasons, the future fates of these three departments – Defense, Education and State – are more inextricably linked than ever before. America’s approach to foreign and domestic policy cannot be separated any longer. “Smart power” abroad will never be wielded without “smart growth” at home. And when it comes to contemporary notions of diplomacy and national defense, there is no American institution more essential to the unique modern cause than our public schools, and no skill-set more valuable than the ability to see – and be seen – without firing a single bullet.

Two unrelated articles in yesterday’s New York Times – one about the ostensible decline of influence in American geopolitics, and the other about the ostensible rise of autism in American schoolchildren – have led me to consider a radical proposal:

Let’s merge the Departments of Education, State and Defense.
Georgetown professor of foreign policy Charles Kupchan indirectly argued for such blasphemy when he noted the ways in which the landscape of modern diplomacy is shifting uneasily beneath our once-sturdy Western feet. Pointing to the nascent revolutions in the Middle East, the success of state capitalism in China and Russia, and the growth of left-wing populism in India and Brazil, Kupchan illustrates the ways in which “rising nations are fashioning their own versions of modernity and pushing back against the West’s ideological ambitions. As this century unfolds,” he argues, “multiple power centers, and the competing models they represent, will vie on a more level playing field. Effective global governance will require forging common ground amid an equalizing distribution of power and rising ideological diversity.”

In foreign policy circles, Kupchan’s observation is not a new one. Just a year ago, two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff anonymously released a Pentagon report (published under the nom de plume of “Mr. Y.”) in which they questioned America’s ongoing willingness to overvalue its military might, and undervalue its young people.  “By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans,” they argued, “we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future.” In a subsequent article for Foreign Policy, Center for American Progress scholar John Norris sang a similar tune: “The key to sustaining our competitive edge, at home or on the world stage,” he wrote, “is credibility – and credibility . . . requires engagement, strength, and reliability – imaginatively applied through the national tools of development, diplomacy, and defense.

Meanwhile, in the same section of the paper, journalist Amy Harmon reported that one in 88 American children are now diagnosed with some form of autism. While not everyone agrees about the root cause for the spike in numbers, Thomas Frazier, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Autism, thinks it’s an accurate reflection of modern society. “Our world is such a social world,” he said. “I don’t care if you have a 150 I.Q., if you have a social problem, that’s a real problem. You’re going to have problems getting along with your boss, with your spouse, with friends.”

Drawing a link between these two articles may feel like a stretch until you consider that the central problem in both stems from the same troubling source: our systemic inability to make deep and lasting sense of the perspective of others. In fact, there’s a growing theory in the scientific community that autism is the result of an early developmental failure of mirror neurons – the cells in the brain most responsible for allowing us to imagine (and empathize with) the thoughts and feelings of others. This theory may help explain why the greater the impairment in an individual on the autism spectrum, the greater the likelihood that individual will fixate on objects, not people. And it may help explain why some of the most promising new treatments involve little more than non-autistic adults imitating the behavior of autistic children. As UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni explains, “When the therapist imitates his patients, he may activate their mirror neurons, which in turn may help the patients to see their therapist, literally.”

What both articles underscore is how badly we need to invest in our collective capacity to see the world, and each other, more clearly. Kupchan’s characterizations about the changing landscape of geopolitics echo Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of more than 50 years ago, in his final formal act as commander-in-chief, when the five-star general suggested that the most promising path to peace rests in “learn[ing] how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” And Harmon’s report on the rise of autism speaks to a larger deficit in our society – a deficit we have partly fueled by putting the knowledge cart before the emotional horse for so long. Indeed, whereas the 20th century cast the quest for global harmony as a black and white battle between neatly categorized competitors, the 21st century playing field is shrouded in overlapping shades of gray. To negotiate such a surface effectively, we need citizens endowed with a different set of habits and skills – ones more aligned with what Tom Friedman famously called the end of the “command and control” system of organization, and the beginning of the “connect and collaborate” approach.

For these reasons, the future fates of these three departments – Defense, Education and State – are more inextricably linked than ever before. America’s approach to foreign and domestic policy cannot be separated any longer. “Smart power” abroad will never be wielded without “smart growth” at home. And when it comes to contemporary notions of diplomacy and national defense, there is no American institution more essential to the unique modern cause than our public schools, and no skill-set more valuable than the ability to see – and be seen – without firing a single bullet.

Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Like most parents of a young child, I’m trying to decide which environment will be the best for my son when he enters a public school for the first time next fall. At nearly every open house my wife and I attend, cheerful administrators and educators tout the advantage of being a “participatory” school, and of “giving children the opportunity to learn and work in groups.” Send your child here, they tell us, and he’ll acquire a core set of democratic skills – from working collaboratively to acting empathetically – that will help him successfully negotiate our increasingly interconnected global community.

Sounds great, I say – until I open my Sunday New York Times and read a cover story warning against the rise of a new type of groupthink. “Most of us now work in teams,” writes author Susan Cain, “in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”

Whom should we trust? Have we overvalued democratic skills like collaboration and shared decision-making to our own detriment? And, in the end, should our schools be more or less democratic?

The answer, of course, depends on which values and behaviors we associate with that word – democratic. And the reality is that too often, too many of us – from local educators to federal policymakers – define it in a way that limits our collective capacity to understand what a healthy, high-functioning learning community really looks like, and requires.

In many schools, “democracy” is a subject students study in social studies, or via a special add-on program, or, if your school still has such a thing, in civics class. It’s something schools and districts seek separate grant money to support. And it’s something that, in the end, you learn about – whether it’s the three branches of government or the legislative process or the twenty-seven Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Call it “Democracy via Content.”

In other schools, the word stands for something very different – a philosophy of human interaction that guides how adult decisions are made and how students interact with each other. In these places, what matters most is how the classroom itself is structured (or unstructured), and the messiness of the approach becomes the central message about what it all means. Call it “Democracy via Process.”

Problems arise whenever we overvalue either approach. In an environment where democracy is seen solely as a subject, children memorize their rights but never practice them. And in a classroom where democracy is seen primarily as a process, children sit in circles or work in teams – regardless of whether or not those methods are helping them learn more effectively.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan underscored this point at a recent White House forum. “The goals of traditional civic education – to increase civic knowledge, voter participation, and volunteerism– are all still fundamental,” he asserted. “But the new generation of civic learning puts students at the center. It includes both learning and practice — not just rote memorization of names, dates, and processes.” Harvard’s Tony Wagner agrees, noting that there is a “happy convergence between the skills most needed in the global knowledge economy and those most needed to keep our democracy safe and vibrant.”

In a healthy school, educators know which skills – from collaboration to self-direction – their students must develop to be successful as adults, and which combination of content and processes will get them there. Some days, that might mean working in groups; other days, it might mean listening to an old-fashioned lecture. And every day, it means school leaders are aware of the paradoxical human impulse at the center of any democratic society – a point Ms. Cain makes in her Times article. “Most humans have two contradictory impulses,” she writes. “We love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.”

A democratic learning environment honors both needs. That’s why from now on, the first thing I’ll ask at the open house is if the school understands which specific skills it wants to cultivate in its students, and why. I’ll ask which processes the teachers will use to engage kids in their own learning, and why. And when I find a school with clear answers and a clear plan for developing both “choice and voice,” I’ll know where to send my son.

Art in the Ownership Society

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Art in the Ownership Society

If you’re looking for the latest signs of America’s cultural descent into inanity, look no further than this past weekend’s Sunday Styles section in the New York Times, and its review of Maria Abramovic’s performance piece at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent fundraising gala.

What you’ll find is a double-dose of a certain kind of worship; on one hand, there’s Abramovic herself, whose willingness to serve as the evening’s “benevolent despot” stems from her own love of the power to make powerful people do her bidding amidst a surreal backdrop of human centerpieces, heads emerging through holes in tables, and mandatory white lab coats being donned by partygoers whose fancy outfits were intended to provide their own form of artistic expression. And then there’s the Times review itself, which is less about journalist Guy Trebay’s assessment of Abramovic’s ability to surface submerged truths through her art, and more about his own infatuation with the event’s outer trappings, from its 800 socialite and celebrity attendees to Abramovic’s “$1,500 handbag from Givenchy.”

I took note of the article because it was just a week ago that I first heard about the MOCA event, courtesy of the California-based collaborative artist, Brett Cook. Cook’s own work is currently on display throughout the streets of Oakland as part of his Reflections of Healing project, a series of eight murals of local community healers whose portraits, colorfully completed by local residents with spray paint, depict each adult as he or she looked as a teenager – “in order to honor the ways young people have reshaped their worlds and, by extension, transformed ours” – and which are now permanent installations at libraries throughout the city.

“The goal of the series is to remind us of the everyday heroes and heroines who are sustaining life and change in our communities,” explained the forty-three-year-old Cook, who is tall, thin, and buoyant. “And the murals are meant to be just one part of a larger community development effort that is designed to get local residents reflecting on some core questions: What sustains life in the city of Oakland, and how do we model the world we want to see?”

It was through the prism of those questions that Abramovic’s piece came up amidst a small group of artists and friends who were sitting in the center of Cook’s crowded, colorful Oakland studio on a recent weekday afternoon, surrounded by oversized portraits of labyrinthine faces and photographs of Cook’s past public projects. To what extent should we be mindful – as private citizens and/or public artists – of modeling what we wish to see in the world? And if, as the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn says, “Our actions are our only true belongings,” what is the relationship between what we choose to produce, and what processes we use to (co) create them?

For Cook, the answers are clear: “The process I employ with others to create something together is just as important as any end product we produce. It’s about learning to see in a new way with others, more than it is about me imposing my view of the world on anyone else.”

By contrast, the core questions animating the MOCA event weren’t representative of any shared vision of the world; they were reflective of an ersatz veneration of the art of the spectacle itself. As Eli Broad, the museum’s major benefactor, put it, “I know other institutions don’t do things the way we do, but people should do it more.” (Do what exactly?) Museum director Jeffrey Deitsch added his own coda: “We can take risks. We can break a few rules. That’s who we are as people.”

To be clear, artists like Abramovic, and institutions like MOCA, must be free to take whatever risks they wish. It’s also clear that the timing of the event coincides with the myriad upheavals mobilizing so many of us around the world – from Tahrir Square to Zucotti Park – all of which are based on a shared belief that what will sustain societies in the 21st century are not autocratic governments, invite-only fundraisers, and conspicuous consumption, but a more human scale of life and living, a veneration of process as much as product(s), and a commitment to equip all people with the skills and self-confidence they need to become equitable, visible contributors to the common good.

In a recent piece about the Occupy movement for the New York Review of Books, Mark Greenberg captures these values well. “Speaking to protesters in Zuccotti Park recently, I got the sense that they wished people would stop demanding a demand because the idea of one was of little interest to them. It seemed beside the point. What they cared about was the ‘process,’ a way of thinking and interacting exemplified by their daily General Assembly meetings and the crowded, surprisingly well-mannered village they had created on the 33,000 square feet of concrete that comprises Zuccotti Park.

“This,” Greenberg writes, “was really the main project of the Occupy Wall Street organizers: to acquaint new volunteers with their new version of democracy. Why, they asked, curtail the growing mystique of [the movement] with something as ordinary as a political demand?”

Why indeed? After all, whether it’s an Occupy camp site or a community-based art project, sometimes, in an ownership society that has gone bankrupt, what’s most valuable is not what we produce, but which processes we use to help people recapture the human scale of life, and which spaces we open up for all of us to make visible what we wish to see more of in the world.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform

With all due respect to Flannery O’Connor, my vote for greatest American short-story writer goes to Ray Carver.  And with all due respect to America’s current crop of leaders, my hope is that they convene a summer book club to read Carver’s stories – and heed his central message.

I’m thinking specifically of his collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As with all of Carver’s work, it’s a collection filled with a cast of characters best suited for the island of misfit toys – or the town in which you live. These are people who are down on their luck, who have fallen out of love, and who are struggling to find the right words to communicate their feelings, their thoughts, and their sense of how (and where) it all went wrong. Reflected in Carver’s spartan prose are the surface realities of life – the quotidian desperation of the things we sometimes say, see and do. But his genius comes from his ability to surface the submerged emotions of living – the weight of grief, the insufficiency of the words we live by, the slow acknowledgment of seeing what we don’t want to see. Carver’s stories are always about what we know, what we are perpetually struggling to know, and what we talk about while we linger in the chasm in between.

Which leads us to the present moment.

In the last week alone, we’ve seen a national prayer rally in Houston, the worst rioting in London in two decades, and – oh yeah – the first-ever downgrading of the U.S. government’s credit rating. More narrowly, fools like me who focus on school reform for a living are burdened by a national debate that still frames success or failure in terms of a single indicator of student performance. And everywhere, it seems, people are out of answers, in need of new narratives, and unsure of what to do next.

New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni captured the zeitgeist perfectly in his weekend column, “True Believers, All of Us.” “We all have our religions,” he wrote, “all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now . . . In government and so much else there are a multitude of options to weigh, a plenitude of roads to take and a tendency to puff up the one actually taken, because doing so squelches second-guessing and quells doubt. Magical thinking, all of it.”

Bruni’s advice in response?  Less of the thinking that got us into these messes, and more of a willingness to search for entirely new approaches to solving the world’s problems. “Faith and prayer just won’t cut it,” he concluded. “In fact, they’ll get in the way.”

As I read Bruni’s column, I thought of all the magical thinking that exists in my own field. On one side I see smart, well-intentioned people continuing to discuss school reform strategies via the illusory lens of achievement, and refusing to acknowledge the ways in which that word has come less and less to reflect any fully conceptualized reflection of the real thing we seek – learning. At the same time, other colleagues seem convinced that any outside influence is nefarious, that all charter schools are unwanted, and that Arne Duncan is the antichrist.

These are not just straw men – they are, as Carver suggested, the things we talk about when we are unsure of what to actually talk about. They are what we cling to when we are unsure of what to do next. And they are massive obstacles standing between us and a new way of seeing public education – and making it better, more accessible, and more equitable for succeeding generations of Americans.

What if we heeded the wisdom of Carver’s stories and acknowledged we’re struggling to talk about what we really need to talk about because no one wants to admit we’re not really sure how to get there from here? Would doing so help us start to address not just the concrete, visible aspects of school (academic growth, prescriptive policies, structural reforms), but also the intangible, invisible aspects of schooling (emotional growth, holistic practices, appreciative inquiry)? Would such a change even make a difference?

It’s only a hunch, but I think integrating these lines of thinking – the logical and the emotional, the visible and the invisible, etc. – is the only chance we have at true paradigmatic change, which Thomas Kuhn defined back in 1970 as “change in the way that problems are posed and solved; change in the unconscious beliefs what about is ‘real’; change in the basic priorities and choices about what to pursue and what social ends to serve; change in those approaches and solutions which display the whole world view as a coherent whole.”

Is the coherent whole what we really want to talk about when we talk about school reform? Is it something else? Or am I merely engaged in my own form of magical thinking?’

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The X Factor of School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The X Factor of School Reform

In case you missed it, there was a great piece in yesterday’s New York Times, the core message of which has a lot of relevance for those of us who, barely a week removed from not one but two major reports of misleading test data being used to evaluate schools and school districts, continue to search for the simplest way of evaluating what may be the most complex undertaking in the professional world — creating a challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential learning environment in which all children can learn.

The Times article had nothing to say about school reform — it was about the Fed’s inability to decide whether to stimulate the economy now or later. And it was about how even in a social science flush with quantitative data, the “social” aspect of the science — i.e., human behavior — is sufficiently complex and nonlinear to make certainty a chimera. “One point I always make to my graduate students,” said Robert Solow, a Noel Prize winner and MIT professor, “is never sound more certain than you are.”

Would that such caution were commonplace in our current conversations about education reform!

Of course, the message is not that economics is a boundless free-for-all discipline that uses numbers to hide its own guesswork — charges that are sometimes made to rebut the growing push in education circles to embrace a greater use of student information to guide adult decision-making — but one message seems clear: beware the worship of “data” in your search for certainty, as long as human beings are part of the equation. “The entire question of how emotion will change people’s behavior is pretty much outside the standard model of economics,” said Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke. “Pride is not in the model. Fear is not in the model. Revenge is not in the model. Even simple things like disenchantment of people who are fired from their jobs — the model doesn’t account for how devastating that experience can be.”

Reform leaders, are you listening?