Public Education is No Place for Great Teachers

I know you may be as shocked as I am for titling a post in this manner.   I need to first put in a VERY big caveat:  I am pro-teacher.   I come from a family of great teachers; however, teachers have been hamstrung for decades, and the digital revolution is only accelerating the crisis facing the teaching profession.

If you don't think that public education needs a major butt-kicking, then you haven't read this recent story about a Sacramento’s teacher of the year, Michelle Apperton, who just lost her job as result of budget cuts in her district. The school district had no choice but to let her go as a result of a policy dictating that teachers be laid off based on seniority, not according to performance.

I was mortified when I saw this story that CNN picked up.   And folks like Diane Ravitch continue to cause great harm to the efforts to try and reform the system.  Ms. Ravitch has only recently reiterated her stance that teacher evaluation using even a FRACTION of its criteria on quantitative measures does NOT outweigh experience.  She still believes that seniority and tenure is good for the profession.   When I read this, I ran to my punching bag.

Why in g-d's name would any organization fire their best talent?   Now in the case of entertainment and sports, that is an exception, because sometimes talent lets their ego get in the way, or vice versa.  We're talking major dollars here.   That is not the case in public education, where even salaries are "scaled" very precisely.  This is what I call the "death spiral" for any organization.

Public schools like Sacramento will hide behind the "budget cuts" explanation.  However, they have let things deteriorate for years.  If they had embraced new approaches decades ago, things may not have gotten this dire this quickly.   In fact, I have to refer my readers to some analogies that resonate in this Harvard Business Review blog titled, "Why Newspapers Were Doomed All Along."  There are some excellent lessons learned from this because some newspaper businesses diversified their risk and experimented with innovation decades ago.   Public education should have done the same thing.

It pains me to see school districts fire their best teachers because folks like Diane Ravitch are pushing the unions to defend policies and positions that are outdated and misguided.   Only when both sides sit down in a spirit of collaboration, will real solutions be found.

How many more Michelle Appertons are out there?  I bet tens, maybe hundreds of thousands.

Kids Need Time To Decompress

Now that school is out, there has been lots of articles written about whether or not to rank students and have Valedictorians.  We push our kids so hard with homework, studying for tests, extracurricular activities leaving very little time for kids to "be kids."  Socialization is a much overlooked developmental area, as is recess.  The concept of play is critical to a child's development, and this can be physical or mental.

Recently, I came across an article that truly fascinated me.   Titled, "Why Daydreaming Isn't a Waste of Time," it talks about the research of University of Southern California education professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who believes that adults need to teach children the value of "the more diffuse mental activity that characterizes our inner lives: daydreaming, remembering, reflecting."

That's right, there is value in "introspection."  Some of the most famous people who ever inhabited the earth:   Einstein, Edison, Newton - they all daydreamed from time to time, some who actually scheduled it into their daily rituals.  From one passage in the article:

Ironically, a lack of time to daydream may even hamper kids’ capacity to pay attention when they need to. The ability to become absorbed in our own thoughts is linked to our ability to focus intently on the world outside, research indicates. In one recent neuro-imaging study, for example, participants alternated periods of mental rest with periods of looking at images and listening to sounds. The more effectively the neural regions associated with “looking in” were activated during rest and deactivated while attending to the visual and auditory stimuli, the more engaged were the brain’s sensory cortices in response to sights and sounds.

Like everything else we do in our lives, we have to strike a balance with all of our activities.   Parents are as guilty as children in this area, and so it is important for parents to do effective role modeling.   So before you over-schedule your kids, keep in mind a child's need to "decompress" and reflect.   If we let our children daydream a little, they might become the next Einstein, Edison or Jobs.  That's not such a bad thing!

Is Georgia's Public Education System Nearing The Breaking Point?

The past few weeks have been hard for me.   A number of concerning news stories have come out, and I believe they all share a common thread:

"APS School Chief Opposes Addition of a High School at Drew Charter School" 

"Amid Budget Deficit, Clayton County Schools Cut Teachers and Reduce Technical Training"

"Dekalb Schools, Facing $70 Million Deficit, Searches For Cuts"

"Dekalb School Cuts Could Include Fernbank Science Center"

"Clayton County Proposing To Eliminate 8th Grade Sports To Save Money"

There have been so many articles written about the "financial distress" facing public schools, and they are now making "King Solomon-like" decisions.   Have you figured out the common thread yet?   It's that the system is irretrievably broken.  why else would a school district such as Atlanta Public Schools not allow the most successful charter school in the city to try and replicate its success at the high school level?  The graduation rate of its students is more than 20 percentage points higher than APS, yet the Superintendent has rejected its expansion plans.   Making draconian cuts as stated in the above stories is NOT the answer.

This is not a liberal or conservative problem, this is a bi-partisan problem.   When school districts such as Atlanta Public Schools spend more than $15K per pupil, yet graduate barely more than half of them, it is clear that money is not the problem.    Dekalb County, the 3rd largest school district in the state of Georgia, feels that it needs to RAISE property taxes to go along with a series of budget cuts.   More money is not going to solve the problem.   Our public education system has been badly managed, and reluctant to change, when the world has changed around it.   And it's our precious children that have been made to suffer.

Georgia's public education woes are not unique to Georgia.   It's time for all parties to sit down and realize that the system is not working, and doesn't just need "tweaking," but a massive overhaul.  We need to change course, and fast.   I say this from the point of view of a strategist and has looked at the problems facing public education objectively.  I am not some "school choice" lobbyist, nor am I a mouthpiece for any special interest group.    I support innovation in education and believe that we must change our approach before we lose a generation of talent and put our economic competitiveness at risk.  

So when will our politicians, educators and parents get angry and start collaborating on real solutions to our education challenges?   The time is NOW.

Reforming Public Education Requires Abandoning Labels and Fear of Change

If there is anything I have learned in recent weeks, it's that reforming public education in the United States requires embracing change, not fearing it.   It is amazing how people are unwilling to look at any policy papers because they label the authors as "conservative" or "anti teacher."   People will go to great lengths, and even wage personal attacks on people in order to protect the status quo.

Let me be clear.   On most social issues, I lean more towards the "left" than most people do.   Education, however, is not a "liberal" or "conservative" issue.  It's about our children, and the fact that our current system was built for a mass-standardization, Industrial Revolution era in our nation's history.  I support innovation, and that requires change.  Yet throughout the past few years, and more intensely the past several weeks, I have been branded a "right wing extremist," a supporter of "private vouchers," and someone who supports more corporations getting into the public education arena.   Why are people so keen on making judgments about my point of view?

I have been personally attacked on the most anachronistic education blog in Atlanta, called Get Schooled  It's author has a clear agenda to attack any trends that might change the system.  She is anti-digital learning, anti charter school, protector of local public school monopolies and yet the newspaper she writes for refuses to allow an additional education blog that provides an alternate perspective on education policy impacting Atlanta, and Georgia for that matter.   Why is this acceptable?  Where is the public outrage?

Again, what I support is systemic change in our education system.   Teachers need to be better trained, better evaluated, better compensated, and more flexible in how they teacher our children.   Local school boards cannot have exclusive control over charter schools - what is wrong with competition?  And how can we innovate if all innovation is stifled by the status quo?   Digital learning knows no geographic boundaries, yet how can local school boards put a walled garden around such learning opportunities?  Why are teachers, and their unions, afraid that digital learning will result in fewer jobs?  What about the positive aspects of digital learning, such as expanding the reach of the best teachers?  Or freeing teachers up from administrative tasks to focus more on differentiated instruction?    What about improving the operating efficiency of public education by allowing certain pieces of the infrastructure to be run at the state level?   Why is it ok that school systems such as Atlanta Public Schools can spend $15K per pupil, yet only graduate 52 percent of its students?   There are so many questions I have about public education?   I do not disrespect teachers, but their unions are preventing real change, and teachers need more tools to thrive in a digital world.

Our education system MUST change, for the sake of our children.   It is time that everyone starts to keep an open mind and start compromising to get things done.   The world has changed in the past century, EXCEPT public education.   Our children deserve a quality education, and there are few places that are meeting this vision.

If people have the courage to open their minds and start working together to reform public education, then maybe there will still be hope for our children.   The United States is the greatest democracy on the planet, but lets stop the partisanship and start collaborating to maintain our international competitiveness for generations to come.

Education Reform for the Digital Era

It has become increasingly clear to me that the way to reform public education is not to work within the existing system, but to rebuild it from the ground up.    Change cannot happen under the current framework.  My colleague Michael Horn at the Innosight Institute has it 100% right.   Disruptive innovation is the only way to get the system to change.   I am more convinced than ever that more money is not going to do anything for our children.   There is plenty of money; however, there is too much wasteful spending in our local monopoly-driven system.

I decided to title this blog post identical to a recent white paper I read from the Fordham Institute.   It is free to the world, and, contrary to what many people have labeled as a "conservative" point of view about education reform, it is nothing of the sort.   The extensive paper comprises well-researched policy recommendations on how we can reposition our public schools for success in a digital world.   How can our schools embrace technological innovation and digital learning?   The first paragraph of the introduction: Overcoming the Obstacles to Digital Learning,  provides an excellent lens into the objectives of the paper:

Digital learning is more than the latest addition to education reformers’ to-do lists, filed along with teacher evaluations, charter schools, tenure reform, academic standards, and the like. It’s fundamentally different: For digital learning to fulfill its enormous potential, a wholesale reshaping of the reform agenda itself is required, particularly in the realms of school finance and governance. But just as online education needs those reforms if it is to flourish, so does deep education reform need digital learning, which can provide valuable solutions to some of education’s greatest challenges—beginning with the basic obsolescence of its familiar delivery system.

The paper is comprised of five detailed, research-driven sections:

Chapter 1: Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction
Chapter 2: Quality Control in K–12 Digital Learning:
Chapter 3: The Costs of Online Learning
Chapter 4: School Finance in the Digital-Learning Era
Chapter 5: Overcoming the Governance Challenge in
                   K–12 Online Learning

There is some excellent guidance in the material about the promise of digital learning and why teachers should embrace it, not fear it.   However, the paper does a fine job at framing three significant barriers to successful implementation of digital learning in public education:

• Self-absorbed and self-serving groups that do their utmost either to capture the potential of technology to advance their own interests or to shackle it in ways that keep it from harming those interests.
• Issues of organizational capacity within our public education system, a system that has enormous
  difficulty accommodating and assimilating change—and the more wrenching the change the greater the difficulty.
• Core governance and financing structures of our K–12 system itself.

Teachers fear the "unbundling" of learning that digital learning promises.   Education is not bound by the walls of one classroom and one teacher.   How you train teachers and measure their effectiveness when they do not have full control over a child's academic development poses material challenges in our current education system that is run by local monopolies and teachers unions.   That is NOT a conservative or liberal perspective - that is REALITY.    You cannot leave local school districts in control of online learning, as it will retard innovation.  Let me leave you with one final excerpt from the paper, which again, I encourage all of you to take the time and read:

Now consider our agricultural-era devotion to “local control” of public education and ask how this arrangement can possibly work well—indeed, what it even means—when the delivery system itself is unbound by district, municipal, or even state borders. Who is really “in charge” when students assemble their education from multiple providers based in many locations, some likely on the other side of
the planet? Digital learning, like digital communications, lives on the Internet—often “in the cloud”—and knows no natural geographic or political boundaries. Sure, it can be inhibited by totalitarian regimes that fear websites or any communications that may loosen their grip. When left to flourish in the marketplace, however, digital learning will yield innovation, competition (affecting content, quality, delivery mechanisms, and price), and eventual economies of scale. And those will—and ought to—develop without regard to municipal boundaries.

I could write pages and pages of material about this work, so I ask you all to read it for yourselves.   Keep an open mind, and please share your insights with me after you've had a chance to read it.  

The road map is there, my friends - we just require the courage to change.  Lets do it for the sake of our children's generation.