I never wanted to change the system, or buck the system, or become any kind of reformer. All I wanted was to get a K-12 Reading Specialist endorsement on my teaching certificate. I wanted to do a better job teaching and advance on the pay scale. I went to graduate school and got a dose of the latest literacy research. But there’s a downside to the bleeding edge. Making changes in the classroom has been problematic: Schedules don’t work for projects; kids get pulled out of the class for remedial help that is antithetical to my view of literacy; parents are mystified by project rubrics; the report card demands numbers that describe complex achievements; curriculum assumes lockstep progress through a skills-based agenda for age-grouped students with vast ability and motivation differences. And then there’s the government…
Education bloggers hammer on this subject all the time. School reform. How do we “fix” education? We’ve got to get people to understand…(your choice). I’m as caught up in the discourse as anyone. I found a transcript of a 1995 interview with Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control. I hadn’t heard of him before, but I’m now a new Kevin Kelly fan. The interview transcript is called The Structure of Organized Change. It offered an ecological model for understanding organizational evolution.
Out of Control
Kelly described organizations as evolving organisms. He used the metaphor of evolution to analyze processes of change. He didn’t specifically address change in education systems, (he used health care systems for his examples) but the relevance to schools was there for me. According to Kelly, “an organization is a set of relationships that persist over time.” As such, an organization tries to anticipate changes in the environment so that it can successfully adapt. Those of us who advocate reform believe that schools are not doing this very well. Of course, there are conflicting views of what kinds of changes are needed, and those views are based on differing assumptions about the proper role of schools in society. Regardless of the ends to which education processes are directed, it’s useful to think about how adaptation works at an organizational level.
Under the heading, “The Limits of Adaptability” Kelly said
It’s generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially. Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far. They have only a limited ability to adapt beyond a certain point. And beyond that point it’s much easier to kill them off and start a new one than it is to change them….Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
That’s where we are now with schools. We’re asking them to do what they were never designed to do. We probably need to let them die in order to move forward. The situatedness of schools in a world that is globally networked makes schooling anachronistic. Who can’t see this? Kids know it. The real problem is that we haven’t yet arrived at consensus for what kids should be doing while their parents are at work. We don’t have a replacement vision.
According to Kelly, what we need to do is give up control and get comfortable with influence.
We don’t drive systems, we shepherd them. The sheep are doing their own thing, eating the grass, finding their own water, producing the wool. We have some guard dogs that are keeping them in line. The shepherd keeps the flock in the right general area, and harvests the results. This is the kind of systems, and the kind of management of systems, towards which we are headed.
I’m at a loss for a better suggestion. I’ve said before that I think teaching is like herding goats. Letting go of old notions of control is hard, but if we’re going to move forward successfully, we need to accurately read the landscape we’re trying to navigate. Giving up control has not been part of the discourse of reform. I’m not fixing anything. I’m herding goats. I understand how they think and I can care about them. I don’t know anything about reforming a system.
12 Comments
“Giving up control has not been part of the discourse of reform.”
Because politics and bureaucracy are all about control, rather than being about leadership. Too many are worried about self-preservation, rather than societal progress.
Hmmm.
Great post, Doug. Thank you.
Great Post!
You know, I’m optimistic. I think the homeschool movement is an example of the killing of schools. In the sheep (goats?) analogy, the home schoolers are sheep that have left the herd and are actively conscientiously seeking a new model. Failures of schools and successes of new models (like homeschool) will fuel the change.
Will people simply abandon schools? Is there (Will there) be an industry built around a new model?
hmmm… My optimism springs from that fact that human culture is great at finding patterns and creating organization. Even if we have forgotten it, before too long we’ll figure it out concerning education and what to do with the kids while adults are at work.
Keep up the good work. I know (can only imagine) that it’s tough being on the bleeding edge. Relax and enjoy the summer!
your reader,
Newman
What an amazing post with so many great questions!
In the business world, I was always told, “Hire the best people with character and then give them the tools to do their job.”
We’ve paid teachers more and got some great teachers in the field, we’ve given many of them some great tools. However, we have micromanaged teachers to the point of stifling out creativity and the “love of the game.” Forms and rhetoric and making someone sit and listen to a person who hasn’t taught in a classroom for twenty years are not what we need to handle education. We need leadership who hold people accountable for their teaching, and we need people who get out of the way and let teachers do what they’ve been hired to do!
Great post!
I don’t think home schooling is going to take over and I don’t think public schools will be abondoned. If that many people were upset with the situation there would be change – I only wish that were true. Its always the state of education in general that is questioned, not my kid’s school, its those other ones.
I could be mistaken because I haven’t talked to enough homeschoolers – maybe 10 or 12, but when I have talked to people that are homeschooling, more often than not they are doing it because their child has a special need or percieved special need that the school has a hard time addressing or even – we make good money and my wife doesn’t have to work and she trained to be a teacher so she gets to teach a class size of 1 to 3 students – I’m not saying there aren’t those that left because they are mad as hell – just that more than just a few left for other reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to change schools.
When I talk to parents I find they are usually not very informed on the good, bad and ugly of schools and NCLB or testing or what is or isn’t being taught or why. They often don’t know why decisions are made a certain way and often haven’t really thought about it or all the implications – kind like the state of voting these days. My own kids go to a school in a very Republican part of town and most don’t support all the emphasis on testing but that wasn’t and isn’t much of a factor in how they cast their vote.
Like Newman, I can only imagine being on the bleeding edge. I try to go there on occasion but I can’t claim to know how it feels to arrive. There’s too much interfererence.
Homeschooling won’t do much for the average person. Most people don’t have the interest or aptitude to do it well. As an alternative to the standard offerings, it has its place and will no doubt continue to work for the people who want it.
I wanted my kids to go to a school where their dad wasn’t a teacher. Where they’d get blamed for stuff they didn’t do. Where they’d meet kids who came from homes different than theirs. Where they’d have to ride the bus and learn cuss words they’d be ashamed to repeat. That’s all happened, and even though they haven’t had teachers all along who did things the way I’d have done them I think they’ve learned more than what they’d have gotten from staying home and doing projects with me or their mom. They do that stuff anyhow.
Public schools aren’t going away. I am, though. A few more years and I’ll have had all the head banging I can take. My job right now is to focus on the simple things that I know are important. Every kid won’t thrive in just the way I hope, but it’s funny how they tell me they’ve had a good year anyway. The ones that had a bad year – a couple of them bailed on me and chose homeschool – I don’t take too personally because I figure I have to work around them and everyone else just like they have to work around me. A little tolerance for error and idiosyncrasy goes a long way toward keeping a an old junker of a truck running past its prime.
You say: “Public schools aren’t going away. I am, though. A few more years and I’ll have had all the head banging I can take.”
If I had a dollar for everytime I’ve heard similar sentiment…
So why is that? How many teachers or administrators do you know that feel education is really going in the right direction? How many seem really satisfied and happy with how things are going? The only ones I know are the oblivious ones that haven’t a clue what is going on outside their classroom. It will be interesting to see what it will take to get it to critical mass – probably when China and India and others really make inroads into our GDP and unemployment skyrockets. I’m just amazed that with all the power we really do have as teachers because of our numbers we don’t use it more effectively to spark change. Maybe we are to tired from doing all we do?
Brian
Brian, the potential energy does exist. But it’s not harnessed to anything new. I wonder how many teachers enter the system with a social agenda. I did, but my understanding was so limited that it’s taken me almost twenty years to see that it won’t happen in the way that I imagined. It’s all bigger, much bigger than I thought. Schooling has never been about change unless it was driven from the top.
This is what Barbara Ganley just wrote about losing hope:
Let’s face it. It’s hopeless for us to think we can change a behemoth like our educational system—it reflects, after all, the fine fix we find ourselves in, and because it very elegantly keeps those with power in power. And so what we do for the time being will continue to be tense, strained even—except with our students in the classroom and on the blogs. They can practice for citizenship at the very least in a learning culture that fosters empathy on the part of the powerful and privileged, and a voice and a say as well as important skills and connections for those clumped into the faceless middle or the marginalized reaches.
We are tired. I am. Every year I carry the burden of two dozen little stories around with me, trying to unlock the hidden meanings of clues left for me by them and their parents so that I can figure out how to move them from where they are to where we can agree they might want to go. At the end of each day I often wonder if any progress was made. Every once in a while I get a sign that something has changed. It takes a lot of time and attention to do all that caring.
Changing a system is beyond my comprehension. Changing a person is challenge enough.
Doug, this is an awesome post. I wanted to write about it when I first read it, then forgot. Funny enough, I was looking at Clustrmaps of Around the Corner with my daughter, and we noticed Alaska. So, my daughter, asked, “Who do you know there?” So, we headed over to see Borderlands and it all came flooding back.
Miguel
Doug, this is a great post with a wonderful ensuing conversation. I’ve probably been teaching a couple years longer than you. There are lots of variables in this equation, but I’m not giving up. Here’s why. Brian stated, “How many teachers or administrators do you know that feel education is really going in the right direction?” My feeling is – “hey, I KNOW the right direction!! Just let me go there!” When I can’t do that, I’ll start looking for somewhere else to make a difference. Hey, aren’t you on vacation? – Mark
There may be some momentum for scrapping the system and starting over, so this discussion could turn out to be valuable. We need to continue to ask ourselves what we need and how to get it so that by the time a strong enough movement is created to rebuild our public school system we’ll be ready with the right questions which are more important than the right answers.
I especially like Vicky’s comment. If only . . .
Doug, you asked me if about the evolution metaphor used by Kelly in my trackback to this post, so I thought I’d transfer that question and my answer here. Your question was:
Brad, thanks for your interest in my post. I’m curious about your point of view on the article that stimulated my thinking. As a scientist you may have a helpful perspective on the use of evolution as a model for understanding organizational change. In the article I referred to, under the heading Complexity Kelly said,
What we find in nature are self sustainable, self repairing, self replicating systems. Isn’t that what we would want for the things that we make? What we would love to create is an organization that went on for a hundred years, got better, continued to grow, repaired itself, exploited itself, and overall governed itself. In order to do that we humans, we creators, have to let go of the thing. We have to surrender some of our control and let the system run itself.
I’m not sure if “letting go of the thing” is the same as starting over. Starting over sounds like a lot of work, and may not result in anything that even comes close to an improvement. Letting go gives us the flexibility to exploit advantages without wasting energy trying to overcome a myriad of obstacles.
Here’s my answer:
The only caveat to add from the metaphor of evolutoin is that change must come from available resources. Evolution cannot simply create a feature out of nothing, no matter how adaptive. There are many examples of “poor engineering” in organisms because selection pressure utilized a preexisting feature for a new purpose. This often results in somewhat contrived features, such as a stressed lower back or backwardly wired eye.
We have the advantage of conscious consideration in effecting change, however. Kelly is suggesting something similar to Asimov (the science fiction writer)in that complex sociologic structures can be modeled as unconcious entities and prediction of their behavior can be made reliably and similarly to the invisible hand of economics (and evolution), but I hope we can expect more from a dedicated campaign to effect change.
I agree that letting go is better than starting over. Letting go just may be the conscious attitude needed to make a behemoth social structure malleable.
Thanks again for such a thought provoking post.
Brad, your response is helpful. It gives me a couple of ideas to consider when thinking about change and culture, because that’s what this is really about. It isn’t a strictly technical matter. What we’re discussing here is the nature of cultural change, of which schooling is one piece. A big piece, I think, but maybe that’s just because it’s in my face so much. As Brian pointed out, most people seem to not think about it very much.
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[...] Doug Noon added a post to his blog, Borderland, that addresses important but complex ideas. His basic argument is that our current model for schools is outdated and probably past the point where mere “reform” can help. Instead, we need to let go of the old model and construct a new one. Unfortunately, there’s no consensus yet on what that new model should look like. In his words: We’re asking [schools] to do what they were never designed to do. We probably need to let them die in order to move forward … The real problem is that we haven’t yet arrived at consensus for what kids should be doing while their parents are at work. We don’t have a replacement vision. [...]
[...] Doug Noon added a post to his blog, Borderland, that addresses important but complex ideas. His basic argument is that our current model for schools is outdated and probably past the point where mere "reform" can help. Instead, we need to let go of the old model and construct a new one. Unfortunately, there’s no consensus yet on what that new model should look like. In his words: We’re asking [schools] to do what they were never designed to do. We probably need to let them die in order to move forward … The real problem is that we haven’t yet arrived at consensus for what kids should be doing while their parents are at work. We don’t have a replacement vision. [...]
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