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| Innovisioning XI |
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| Written by Ron Willett | |
| Thursday, 24 April 2008 | |
Innovation and K-12 EducationReactions to the title may range from “what’s the need,” through “an oxymoron,” to “urgent need.” Not a good omen, the first reaction is likely to come from many of its K-12 establishment and bureaucrats. Critically, the latter reaction has been coming for at least two decades from responsible corporate leaders who will ultimately employ K-12 products, to little avail.
Pragmatically, there are attempts to innovate in education – charter schools, legitimate STEM curricula, digital innovations, problem-based learning, interventions that work in low income schools, real teacher development – they don’t get past being splinter efforts. Why? That merits some answers if any thoughts on innovating in the genre are to be pertinent. Part of an answer is the mass and monolithic texture of American public education. Thank some of our forbearers, but not necessarily for their motivations. American public education was spawned in response to the industrial revolution, conceived by a handful of ideologues, and pushed by the not so idealistic -- Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Ford, et. al. -- to serve up basically literate workers conditioned to follow orders, and to consume the products of mass production. There was little idealism in the design. A product of the above, reflecting a double-edged sword, we have mandatory education, but the numbers and their rigidities are massive: Three and one-half million teachers, working with 54 million students, with major educational unions able to negotiate with systems lacking countervailing power on salaries, work rules or getting rid of incompetent teachers. In a recent New York Times op-ed, “Clueless in America,” Bob Herbert notes that: An American student drops out every 26 seconds; “two-thirds of teenagers old enough to graduate are incapable of mastering college level work;” and “by the 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring (on math and science) generally near the bottom of the industrialized world.” Shrug it off, it’s math and science -- another survey reveals that 20 percent of young adults didn’t know who the U.S. fought in World War II. Catalyzing the issue with bipartisanship, a parallel syndicated column by George Will offered similar critique. Another answer is a product of the explosion of knowledge and the “specialization” that goes with an industrialized society. We readily delegate to our specialists control of widespread societal functions, but with out-of-sight comes out-of-mind. We might not wish to attempt our own heart surgery, but recognized writer, critic and defender of rural communities, Wendell Berry, bills specialization as the “disease of the modern character.” We have forgotten how to require accountability from our “educational specialists” when they fumble critical thinking, or these deficits are either deflected or screened away from public awareness. Next, a passel of swamps: America’s obsession with “local control” of K-12 education, a concept that quit making sense when we substituted motor vehicles, trains and planes for horses and canals, and most assuredly with the invention of the internet; state governments permitted to emasculate NCLB’s few virtues by setting their own educational content standards; and in communities in denial, local schools given a free pass on quality because of our population’s ignorance and school boards oblivious of contemporary learning strategies. Lastly, we also have teachers that too frequently come from the bottom one-third of the collegiate educational barrel, that install their values in the educational process, and even worse administrators turning schools into little gulags of educational methods gibberish and extracurricular idiocy. The core of educational innovation is its belief structures. Theoretically, what teachers believe should be independent of what they do in the classroom. Recently data on values and beliefs were analyzed by the National Opinion Research Center, one of the most reliable data sets in the social sciences. Findings for teachers were evaluated, against other population members with equivalent education. For their education level, U.S. teachers are relatively less supportive of free-speech; they are relatively less tolerant of sexual preference; relatively more likely to oppose abortion; relatively more likely to see themselves “extremely close” to God; and relatively less likely to perceive the need for government to help the poor. Some assert these are personal beliefs, not germane. Reality is, that whether we admit it, every education system is installing values in the process of teaching – should we expect teachers to fall more on the side of American principles of freedom and equality than of censorship, coercion and inequality? How and where do you innovate in this morass? Here are a dozen potential areas of K-12 innovation to ponder. A first innovation would be a national media effort to create greater awareness of where K-12 education must trend to sustain future relevance. The second would seem to be dramatic reform of our schools of education to attract better students and have their dogma better reflect modern neural psychological findings about learning and related technologies. Third, education must reflect that “work” is changing, even how it will be defined in the future. Future work will be vastly different from our history, already in evidence from the movement of factory jobs off shore. Jobs will be driven by service and knowledge needs, and there may be a future disconnect between where one lives versus where they work. The geometric expansion of “knowledge” should have already triggered rethinking of what and how we learn. A fourth innovation is changing NCLB to NSLB, “no state left behind,” accomplished by adopting national content standards for K-12 learning, replacing the patchwork of state manipulated content standards. A fifth innovation is widespread adoption of problem-based learning, which changes the game from allegedly pouring knowledge into heads into creating and nurturing capacities for critical thinking and problem solving. Another variation stretching learning capabilities has already been pioneered in a few systems with new collaboration with colleges and universities to create post secondary transitional learning at grades 11 and 12. A sixth area of innovation is eliminating bureaucratic barriers to future K-12 participation by human resources with subject matter excellence; reforming state educational practices of excluding resources with learning competence from K-12 participation because they aren’t in the “education club.” A seventh innovation must be full-scale adoption of the most advanced digital technologies available. Innovations are employing online learning and digital simulation and gaming folded into on-site work. This art and science are ramping up geometrically, leaving school systems in the dust because they have neither hired competent resources, nor invested in the core technologies. An eighth innovation would be new collaboration between school systems and both their parents and a community’s institutions to enhance the quality of experiences that students receive. The concept that our schools are the private domains of the K-12 bureaucracy has been a key element in the failures of our systems. A ninth innovation should be the creation of learning environments for parents of students in our systems; repetitive research has demonstrated that the familial environment, and how it perceives and values learning, may be as important as the classroom environment in determining student performance. A tenth innovation, change the organizational and management game plan for our schools. Transformational organizations are happening, and the theories and tools of good management applicable to both our private and governmental sectors are applicable to school system planning and management. The present system of electing and training principals and superintendents has created a dug-in class of bureaucrat that defies both contemporary learning and innovation. Eleven, require all candidates for local school boards to complete a unit of training in education theory and practice, and receive testing certification, before being permitted to be seated. The present debacle of local boards frequently populated by political opportunists, candidates with an ideology they wish to advance, or in service of their own egos, needs to be replaced by a system that creates competent local oversight. Innovation twelve, initiate a school taxpayer bill of rights, spelling out financial accountability and transparency required from any school system they support with taxes. In the next decade school enrollments may plateau or even decline, but there is every reason to believe school systems will continue to cynically propose levy increases and build castles because of the ineptitude of much school financial thinking and management. Lastly, make the innovation wish-list a baker’s dozen, consider disruptive innovation: Scrapping the procrustean bed of public education, creating “educational markets,” based on open-economy practices. Invite to the game open-source and networked learning resources, higher education resources, and collaborative blends of present physical infrastructure with entrepreneurial management and learning systems. Let existing teaching resources compete, but not maintain a monopoly on this function. This is a radical solution. It may also be the most effective way to break down the myth that public education is carved in granite as the only mechanism that can install learning for our youth. Though it is only a tiny fraction of educational modes, home schooling has already proven that educated parents can create educated children and high performing adults. Quite literally, our nation is stomping on educational ants while rogue elephants roam the K-12 halls. Note: Ron Willett is a former Indiana University business professor and administrator, and former corporate executive, entrepreneur and CEO. He holds BS and MBA degrees from Miami University, and a doctorate in business administration from Indiana University. He is the creator and editor of TNBJ. |
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