Previously, I outlined why major or structural change was needed in America’s education system. As an example, I mentioned changes such as expanding the scope of education to insure strong support to the parents of newborns. I also mentioned the need to redesign the content and set of education experiences we offer our youth today. Now I would like to examine why it is so difficult to implement and sustain major structural changes to better prepare today’s young people for a very different future. If you assume that this kind of systemic level change is needed, then why is it so slow to happen? Why is the momentum for change so slow that it is like “herding glaciers”? I will mention some significant reasons, as well as the single factor that may be the greatest obstacle to change.
The most commonly cited barrier to change is the fact that education is a social institution. As such, the general public might have some level of concern when greeted with potential changes. For example, there might be resistance to proposed changes in Reading and Math curricula that breaks with tradition. But the levels of concern escalate when it comes to more significant change or education’s efforts to have anything to do with values and norms. The result is a comfort with stability and a fondness for the way things were “when I was in school”.
Another difficulty in implementing systems level changes is lack of capacity. It’s interesting to me that most people outside of education who complain about the lack of change in education blame “the bureaucracy”. In truth, local and state education bureaucracies are not large and they are not strong. A school principal typically has 20-35 direct reports, far more than is the case in most other kinds of organizations. Further, the centralized education staff in school districts (those staff members not based in schools) are so small in number that they usually lack the ability to provide any long-term, in-depth training or support to individual teachers. At the state level, education departments can barely cover the basic data collection and regulatory functions, with very little ability to design or to support the implementation of change. Ironically, the lack of bureaucratic capacity to support change, not the bureaucracy itself, is the significant obstacle.
I believe that the best leverage point for systems change is state level education policy. State level policy is the most reasonable place to start on system level change. Most of the changes I will advocate are too great for a school district to initiate and sustain, but the average length of tenure of a State Superintendent or the equivalent position is only about two years. That is not enough time to initiate and implement the kinds of change needed and it is hard to start over every two years. This means that the lack of continuity of state leadership is another barrier to positive change in many states. (I specifically mention the state level because we have a very poor recent track record of education policy at the federal level.)
While those things mentioned previously are obstacles, they are not the real root cause in the failure to implement education systems change. I believe that our greatest shortcoming is our very low level of commitment to research and development in education. In 2017, Federal expenditures for research and development in education were two tenths of one percent (0.2%) of the total R&D budget. Defense got 193 times more with 38%. Health and Human Services, where the medical research to save our lives originates, got 27% of the Federal R&D expenditures. Without good education research, we chase perceived solutions. We dabble with policies for negative accountability schemes for districts, merit pay schemes for teachers, and charter schools for various niche groups.. We have tried all these policies with little or no research to support these ideas and, in the process, invested money, time and credibility with little result. It is unfortunate that policymakers often vote on policies without looking for supporting research or data. It reminds me of the time a family of a child in our fifth grade classroom “loaned” us a rabbit to care for as part a science class. My students wanted to know if the rabbit was a boy or a girl. I had no idea how to tell, so we voted! We should not put policymakers in the position having to make decisions without science or data before they invest or take risks with our children’s education.
Remember, it may take a while for glaciers to move. But when they move, they can change the landscape for a very long time.
I’ll jump in here with the suggestion that schools, as social institutions, reflect the institutional racism that is present in the greater society. The structures are designed by those in power and are maintained by those who are the winners of the game. Significant system change in education will only come about when we recognize that, among the many things that have changed in the world, the one thing that has remained constant is that all people have and act on biases and that these biases are collectively “cooked-into” our institutions by the dominant group. Any other identified “levers” just tinker around the periphery of a system that is built to sort-and-select, with race being a predominant determinant of that selection.
Evidence: Significant racial disproportionality between the student population and the faculty population in most urban schools and districts; educators who don’t live where they teach; bias as it plays out in school discipline which then extends into the judicial system; curriculum structures where Western Civilization is the norm and all else is the “other”…
Solutions: Revisiting hiring practices at all levels of the organizations; building “educator-pipelines” within schools so students can explore teaching while they achieve core standards/grad requirements; resisting the poisonous pressure of for-profit publishing companies and instead investing fluidly in curriculum materials that involve student voice; confronting bias through professional learning that will, by design, be dis-comforting; requiring urban administrators to serve in residency in an urban school BEFORE they are licensed; requiring DE officals to serve in residency in an urban school setting as a condition of their leadership role; holding administrators accountable for closing gaps among student groups USING AUTHENTIC assessment measures; discontinuing any norm-referencing practices; partnering with Teacher Unions to leverage the social justice mission that was present at their founding; creating asset-based school improvement goals to intentionally cause white students to have to close gaps…since black students have only ever known the feeling of being the group “below expectations”…
David – thanks for your thoughtful comments. I am working on one or two posts related to these comments, so I won’t get into much now except to say that I agree completely about the challenge of institutional racism is much, much broader than education. ASCD’s Educational Leadership magazine discusses some of these same issue in the current edition (http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership.aspx?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=email&utm_content=el&utm_campaign=el-newissue-apr19-email-040519 ). If you need more complexing evidence of the history of how U.S. housing policy contributed to the problem, Check Richard’s Rothstein’s Book the color of Law here
That EL issue was waiting on my desk when I got in this morning. Timely! Thanks for your work so far on this blog. Looking forward to further engagement.
I appreciated reading your thoughts on this, Ted, as well as David’s response (above). I won’t comment on those any further, since his rationale for more equitable, inclusive school environments, as well as a greater emphasis on student voice and choice (which I suspect is among the highest leverage, and yet least employed, strategies in most educational settings) seems largely unassailable. Regarding the assertion that the best leverage point for systems change is state education policy, I don’t disagree with this, in principle. However, Deming and other systems thought leaders have suggested that, while leadership at the top of a system is often critical for transformation, the catalysts for such change can, on occasion, occur at other levels of the system/organization, as well. I would submit that much of the substantive change I’ve observed in schools (both in Iowa and elsewhere) in recent years has emerged at the local level in exemplar schools and districts (granted, usually in relative isolation). One of the key reasons for the rarity of such high quality efforts is that, at nowhere I’m aware of in our formal system of education (from early elementary through graduate school), are systems thinking and the principles of, and tools necessary for, continual improvement comprehensively taught, learned and applied. I’d contend that most educators (and educational leaders) believe that they understand and employ systems-based, continual improvement, but their application of the concept reveals significant gaps (e.g. “band-aid” solutions to surface issues with deeper underlying problems, insufficient planning and preparation, without accounting for elements necessary for sustainability, large rollouts of high stakes initiatives, often in conflict–or at least not in alignment with–previously initiated ones, lack of aligned, pre-identified metrics to effectively monitor progress toward the ultimate aim, lack of understanding of the role of variability in systems, etc.). Having said that, even in cases in which enlightened improvement strategies (and their outcomes) are in evidence, one of the related deterrents to systemic change is our collective inability to bring such innovations to scale. We are constantly being made aware of “pockets of excellence,” without that excellence becoming the norm and this, I suspect, is one way that effective state policy leadership holds the potential to be a game-changer. I also tend to agree with Russell Ackoff, who asserted that organizations and systems tend to be largely resistant to change until they perceive an existential threat. While I suspect many educators are aware of many of the threats facing them, I doubt that such threats are yet viewed by most as existential (which, as I think you’ve pointed out above and in other writing on this site, may be erroneous thinking).
Randy,
Thanks for taking the time to offer a a comment with such depth and insight.
I agree that there have been great changes that emerged locally and I would add that they help to “point the system” toward new possibilities. The issue of going to scale is partly about a difficulty in others adopting a new strategy in a meaningful way, but I believe the larger system seriously lacks capacity to support the development and implementation of needed changes. For example, there is typically not capacity to support the intensive professional development practitioners need to implement new strategies. Also, as I mentioned in posts under Comprehensive Technology, the R&D capacity to develop, distribute and implement comprehensive solutions typically does not exist at a local level and would be efficient to create a regional or state level.
I am very glad that you mentioned systems thinking and continuous improvement – along with the mentions of Deming and Ackoff. I have long been frustrated that the education community did not adapt and adopt these principles in a more complete way. I think that, for many years, educators were literally “afraid”of data since we felt that we had been victimized by others using education data to indict practitioners. For a long time continuous improvement was seen as a concept from a non-human, manufacturing environment too cold to be applied to work with children. We have made great strides since then! But think how long it took to go from the implementation of broad special education programs (mid to late 1970’s) to “response to interventions” or RTI. It took at least 20 years to move from implementing programs to realizing the we needed to modify implementation based on analysis of results!