Category: Learning

Sunday Morning Quarterback

Posted on | by Sam

Earlier this week the DC Public Charter School Board released its latest rankings of every charter school operating in the nation’s capital. Some schools earned higher or lower scores than last year — each school is rated either Tier 1, 2 or 3 — but the majority did not change. No surprise there: these things take time, not to mention the fact that our system for evaluating whether a school is high- or low-performing remains imperfect at best.

Still, the report worried me, mostly because of the language charter leaders used to frame their reactions to the rankings. “If your results aren’t good after a fair period of time, you need to lose your right to operate,” said Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, or FOCUS. And Naomi DeVeaux, deputy director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, said this: “You can’t tread water and stay a Tier 2 school. Each school has to continue to become better.”

On one level, my response is, “Well, of course.” No school should be allowed to continually provide a subpar learning environment, and every school should be proactively seeking ways to improve. Yet what I hear in the undercurrents of these comments is an expectation that schools achieve quick results, sustain a linear march to excellence, and operate under a no-excuses culture of expectations. And maybe it’s just coincidence because we’re in DC, but when I hear that kind of language from the top, I think of the Washington Redskins. And when I consider all we need to do to improve the city’s schools, I can’t think of a worse organizational model for systemic change and sustained success.

For those that don’t follow it closely, the Redskins are a storied NFL franchise with a long history of success — just not recently. In fact, since current owner Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, the Redskins have become a perennial cellar dweller and experienced nearly constant change at the top — seven different head coaches over the past thirteen seasons, to be precise.

This is not exactly a recipe for success. Yet Snyder has spent goo gobs of money over that time, and he clearly, desperately, wants to win. So do the players. So why aren’t the Skins winning? And what does any of this have to do with the DC charter school community?

Simply put, what has plagued the Skins is the impatience of Dan Snyder, and the jittery culture he has established. He overpaid for free agents instead of building through the draft. He failed to consider the ways different pieces come together to form a team — that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And by hiring and firing coaches whenever things didn’t turn around quickly enough, he ensured that his team would never have time to establish a sustainable, long-term road map for success.

By contrast, consider the approach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the NFL’s oldest and most successful franchises. In my 42 years on earth, the Steelers have won six Super Bowls, and played in eight. Along the way, they’ve also had nine losing seasons.  And yet over that entire period, the Pittsburgh Steelers have maintained a consistent organizational identity. They’ve always built through the draft. And in 42 years, while the rest of the sports world lives and dies on each game, they’ve had just three head coaches: Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher and Mike Tomlin.

Which takes us back to the comments of Robert Cane and Naomi DeVaux, and some lessons from the gridiron we would be wise to apply to the classroom as well: Sometimes, successful organizations do tread water. And always, the mark of a great culture is the extent to which it is aligned around core values and principles, and the extent to which its leaders create a culture of security, not anxiety, by their words and actions.

What are the core values and principles that define the shared vision of the DC Public Charter School community? And when it comes to constructing a path for sustained excellence, how can charter leaders be more like the Steelers — and less like the Redskins? There’s no single answer to those questions, but this much seems clear: when it comes to making hiring or firing decisions based solely on a school’s rating (or a team’s record), I can guarantee what legendary Steelers owner Art Rooney would say: that dog just won’t hunt.

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

What’s the Big Idea?

Posted on | by Sam

It’s a good question. And Montgomery County Public Schools superintendent Josh Starr is asking it as part of his new podcast series, which honored me as its first guest.

You can hear the conversation here, but one thing I want to point out: the show is co-hosted by a major urban superintendent and the head of his local teacher union, Chris Lloyd. Their partnership is a model of what’s possible. And their willingness to ask big questions is a reminder that big change is possible even in big districts.

Let me know what you think.

OK, Obama Won. Now What?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on OK, Obama Won. Now What?

It’s official. Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected.

Now what?

When it comes to public education, let’s start by recognizing that Race to the Top was well-intentioned — and ultimately out of step with a truly transformational vision of where American schooling needs to go. Yes, we need better ways to improve teacher quality and capacity; no, we can’t do it by doubling down on what we currently measure. Yes, we need to find a way to ensure equity across all schools; no, we can’t do it by ignoring the ways in which schools are inequitably funded and resourced. And yes, we need to ensure that every young person is prepared to be successful in life by the time they graduate; and no, we can’t do it by continuing to assume that the endgoal of schooling is a discrete set of content knowledge at the same time the new Industrial Revolution is removing all the barriers from knowledge acquisition — and accelerating the need for an essential set of lifeskills and habits.

The definition of leadership I offered in American Schools is the ability to balance a distant vision (“One day . . .”) and an up-close focus (“Every day . . .”). Great organizations, whether they’re schools or Fortune 100 companies, see, nurture, and respond to both mission and vision in everything they do. That’s the tension. That’s the art. And that’s the way to ensure that we’re not just solving the practical problems on our plate; we’re also working towards the aspirational goals that animate our efforts.

In Obama’s first term, we received a series of education policies that addressed the problems on our plate; and we were driven by a mission to perfect our ability to succeed in an Industrial-era system that no longer serves our interests.

What would a healthy tension between vision and mission look like in an ideal second term when it comes to public education? I’d suggest three things:

1. Vision (“One day, every teacher in America will be a special education teacher.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and teacher preparation program will work to deepen its capacity to prepare teachers for the 21st century classroom and its emphasis on greater personalization and customization.”)

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: every child has special needs, and every child deserves an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Here’s something else that’s equally obvious: we are responsible for creating the “short-bus” stigma around special education, and we can change it.

Finland is instructive here. By investing deeply in the capacity of its teachers to diagnose and address the individual needs of children, Finland helped ensure that, in effect, every kid ended up in Special Ed. This removed the stigma, so much so that by the time they reach 16, almost every child in Finland will have received some sort of additional learning support. We could do the same. President Obama can’t require traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs from overhauling what they do, but he can certainly put public pressure on them to do so. And individual schools and districts can certainly shape their own professional development calendars with an eye toward that long-term vision, and a step toward the short-term goal of equipping teachers to become more fluent in the full range of student needs.

2. Vision (“One day, every child will be equipped to use his or her mind well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and classroom will identify, and assess, the skills and habits it believes its graduates will need in order to use their minds well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”)

As I’ve said before, it’s time for teachers to stop defining themselves as passive victims of the policies of No Child Left Behind. It’s been a decade, and no one has stopped us from identifying — and then piloting — a better, more balanced way to assess student learning and growth.

Actually, that’s not true. The New York Performance Standards Consortium has been doing this for awhile now, and with great results. Individual schools like The Blue School in New York City or Mission Hill School in Boston have been doing it. And forward-thinking districts like Montgomery County in Maryland are exploring ways to do it more.

What are the rest of us waiting for?

The future of learning is one in which content knowledge stops being seen as the end, and starts being understood as the means by which we develop and master essential skills and habits — the real endgoal — that will help us navigate the challenges and opportunities of work, life and global citizenship. This future will require us to do more than merely give lip service to the skills we value; it will demand that we find ways to concretely track and support each child’s path to mastery, while maintaining our awareness and appreciation for the nonlinearity of learning and of human development. And the good news is the art and science of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive. We can do this. In fact, many of us have already begun.

3. Vision (“One day, it will be universally agreed-upon that education in America is a public good, not a private commodity.”); Mission (“Every day, every policymaker and decision-maker will repeat this vow: whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children.”)

In America, we hold two definitions of freedom in creative tension: the first is the capitalistic definition, in which freedom means choice and consumption; the second is the democratic definition, in which freedom means conscience and compassion.

This will never change; our challenge will always be to manage the tension between the two in ways that serve both. But it’s foolish to unleash choice and consumption in American public education and expect that it will deepen our capacity to exercise conscience and compassion. We can either see education as a private commodity or as a public good. And we must choose.

That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of charter schools or choice; in fact, I’d say it’s undeniable that almost every great school I’ve visited has become great in part because it had greater freedom to chart its own path. But it does mean any investments in school choice need to be proactively made in light of the original vision of charter schools, and that we stop pretending that schools with smaller class sizes, better-trained teachers, and richer learning options are only appealing or viable for the families of the wealthy or the well-located. Simply put, a great learning environmentis challenging, relevant, engaging, supportive, and experiential — no matter who the kids are, and no matter where the community is located.

If I were in charge, those would be my marching orders.

What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Empathy Formula

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Empathy Formula

For over a year now, I’ve been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society — and who are bold/quixotic enough to envision a world in which one day, every child learns to master it as readily as s/he masters the ability to read and write.

The challenges associated with an idea this big are myriad. Public education in America is organized around content knowledge, not skills. It defines success via the prism of intellectual, not emotional, growth. It survives via compulsion, not commitment. Any effort to elevate a “soft skill” like empathy must unfold within a larger culture that aspires, tragicomically, to be Bruce-Willis hard. And any adult who already sees the value of nurturing empathetic children needs useful guidance in how to actually do it.

It’s a tall order. And in a recent conversation with some of my Ashoka colleagues, I heard something that might diffuse all those challenges in a single stroke.

As it turns out, there’s a formula we can use to explain how people master empathy, even if no one’s ever described it that way before. And best of all, it’s got a familiar ring to it:

E = EC².

This “Empathy Formula” first emerged out of a conversation several years ago between Emotional Intelligence author Dan Goleman and behavioral scientist Paul Ekman. As Goleman describes it, the two men were discussing FEMA’s feckless response to Hurricane Katrina, and trying to clarify what went wrong, and how the full range of human capacity could be activated in solving our most intractable problems in the future.

What Goleman and Ekman mapped out — in a little-read blog post from 2007 – was three different ways a person can convey empathy. The first is “cognitive empathy,” or the act of knowing how another person feels. This is the first stage of becoming empathetic, and while it may be helpful in motivating people or running for elective office, it also has a dark side if it exists in isolation: narcissism and sociopathic behavior, to name a few.

The second is “emotional empathy,” or the capacity to physically feel the emotions of another. Until recently, we were at a loss to explain how, or even why, we do this. But now scientists have located the process in a set of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These cells are what help us recognize and understand the deepest motives and needs of our fellow human beings. As with cognitive empathy, however, emotional empathy can have troublesome consequences if applied in isolation. As Goleman writes, “One downside of emotional empathy occurs when people lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions can be seen in the psychological exhaustion that leads to burnout. The purposeful detachment cultivated by those in medicine offers one way to inoculate against burnout. But the danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring.”

That leads to the third and final part of the formula — “compassionate empathy”, which is what occurs when we combine the previous two in the name of acting upon what we think and feel. This was the missing ingredient in FEMA’s response to Katrina. Is it possible that it’s also the key to helping us unpack not just how to walk in another’s shoes, but also how to act compassionately on their, and our, behalf?

What would happen if schools were more mindful of this Empathy Formula? Instead of offering disconnected but well-intentioned efforts to help children think, feel or act, would adults start to help children think, feel and act? Would communities be increasingly populated with people who were neither narcissistic nor emotionally empty? And would the most pressing problems of our day — from energy to education to enlivening our civic life — be analyzed, internalized, and diffused by a new generation of changemakers?

Ashoka certainly thinks so. What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

 

This is the Future of Learning

Posted on | by Sam

Some of the not-so-subtle Ericcson pitches may throw you off, but don’t let them. This video is worth twenty minutes of your time, as a way to see what’s coming — and why we should not be afraid. You may also want to check out this weekend’s story in the New York Times about MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses). And here’s a short blog post that captures the reactions of some Alabama high school students moments after watching it.

This Revolution Is Not Being Televised

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on This Revolution Is Not Being Televised

There’s an important new consensus developing around how people learn – and a missed opportunity about how to start applying that knowledge in schools. We’d be wise to pay closer attention to both trends.

The consensus is that man cannot live by intellect alone – that our physical, social and emotional selves matter equally when it comes to human development and growth. You’ll see evidence of this consensus across a wide range of mediums and public voices:  from opinion pieces in the New York Times to bestselling books about both the brain and school reform. As David Brooks writes in a recent column, “It’s become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress.” And as a veteran educator points out in Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed, “This push on tests is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

Although the amount of attention being paid to these sorts of observations is new, the insights being chronicled are not. Indeed, decades of strong social science research, sparked by Dan Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, have helped bring a more integrated view of learning into focus.

The good news is that our historically myopic view of schools as knowledge factories is starting to fade away, and public voices like Brooks and Tough are helping to promote a more holistic view of education to a wider audience of Americans. The bad news is that too many public voices are continuing to overlook a body of research and evidence-based practices that schools can rely on right now to transform their learning environments.  Across the entirety of his new book, for example, Tough cites copious research studies and school-based programs – yet not once does he reference the expansive field – social and emotional learning, or SEL – that has, for twenty years, been at the forefront of researching how schools can apply the science of learning in ways that will deepen, not diminish, the art of teaching.

SEL’s flagship institution is the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning – or CASEL. And the programs it evaluates have been thoroughly researched, revised, and well received. The RULER Approach helps schools support the development of five essential life-skills: Recognizing emotions in oneself and others; Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; Labeling the full range of emotions using a rich vocabulary; Expressing emotions appropriately in different contexts; and Regulating emotions effectively to foster healthy relationships and achieve goals. Responsive Classroom’s widely used “Morning Meeting” approach helps children build both academic and social-emotional competencies.  And states like Illinois have gone so far as to adopt a statewide set of social and emotional standards that schools can use to guide and frame their work.

Recently, CASEL extended its work even further by partnering with eight school districts around the country in an effort to demonstrate, across a variety of settings, what it looks like when a system of schools is organized to value both what children know and who they are.  Yet most of the leading public voices on school reform act as though SEL doesn’t exist.

What organizations like CASEL demonstrate is something we would all be wise to remember: that we know more than we think we do about what great learning environments actually look like – and require. And what contemporary commentators like Brooks and Tough overlook is something we would all be wise to acknowledge: that when it comes to reimagining education, we do not need to start from scratch.

Great schools already recognize the multiple pathways through which young people must grow and develop. Great programs already exist to support schools in this work. And while it’s true that we are still waiting for the great policies, that doesn’t mean the  learning revolution isn’t already well underway.

The Adult-Free School?

Posted on | by Sam

No doubt you’ve seen the intriguing story making its way around the Internet today about the Ethiopian kids who hacked the free laptops they were given in less than six months – and without any adult instruction.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great story, and it’s illustrative of the extent to which we underestimate the abilities of young people. But we’re missing the point if we think the moral is that adults just need to disappear in order for young people to optimally learn and grow.

Some of what adults do needs to disappear — overly structuring what and how we learn, worrying more about what gets poured in instead of what gets pulled out, and thinking that content knowledge is the ultimate end goal. But the adults themselves need to stay — and they need to stay so they can mentor, and prompt, and challenge, and guide, and nurture, and support.

As Paulo Freire said, there’s a big difference between being authoritarian, which shuts down the learning process, and being authoritative, which allows the learning process to thrive. As in all things, the art lies in the balance of it all. So it’s great that these kids figured it out on their own — and it would have been a helluva lot cooler, and progressed a helluva lot faster, if they’d had some caring, skilled guidance along the way.

The New Ninth Ward

Posted on | by Sam

If you’re one of the folks that stopped watching Treme after its first season (“Too boring! Too slow!”), or if you just never bothered to check it out, you might want to check back in. Now in its third season, Treme is proving itself adept at mirroring what creator David Simon’s more celebrated predecessor, The Wire, did better than any show before or since: depict characters struggling and surviving amidst the dysfunctional, intractable, and dialectical systems holding them – and us – prisoner.

In The Wire, the city was Baltimore, and the systems were the drug trade, the public schools, the municipal government, the press, and the police. In Treme, the city is New Orleans, and several of the systems – the schools, the police and the elected officials – make a return appearance. This time, however, Simon adds some new storylines and characters, all of which ride in on the destructive current of Hurricane Katrina, and all of who exist to tell a different story. Indeed, if The Wire was about the older, less visible systems that are holding us prisoner, Treme is about the newer, more visible ones that are being created in the name of progress. The genius of both shows is they refuse to craft a story about something so complicated by oversimplifying the myriad forces at play. As in life, systems and people are more nuanced than mere two-dimensional caricatures – even the ones that hold us prisoner, and even the ones who are up to no good.

I say this because lately I feel like the conversations about school reform in New Orleans are taking on an unhelpful and increasingly entrenched two-dimensional tone: you’re either for the locals, who are being preyed upon by profit-seeking charter schools and carpet-bagging businessmen who see in the chaos of Katrina their last, best chance to remake the city into something new; or you’re for the engines of progress, which recognize that the city’s schools were an embarrassment, its housing projects a blight, and its local traditions best preserved via tangible, lasting monuments, not intangible, romanticized dysfunction.

I say this as someone who knows well-meaning people that have gone to New Orleans as “engines of progress” and who see in its schools the greatest chance to reimagine urban public education for the better. And I say this as someone who feels that much of what they have created is, in effect, perfecting our ability to succeed in an old (Industrial-era) system that no longer serves our interests.

We do ourselves a disservice when we describe school reform in New Orleans in the overly simplistic “privatization of public education” storyline (which is so appealing precisely because it has such clearly defined good people and bad people – and which, like all storylines, is at least partially grounded in the truth). And we are kidding ourselves if we continue to believe that what poor communities need most are outsiders coming in and helping their children raise test scores via a grab bag of teaching methods that not a single “outsider” I know has actually chosen for their own children.

What we have at play in modern New Orleans, in other words, are a few bad people, a lot of bad decisions, and a lot of good (or at least decent) people struggling to succeed amidst larger systemic ways of seeing and thinking that are still holding them – and us – prisoner.

The most recent episode of Treme captures this spirit perfectly in the lyrics of a new song one of the characters has penned in an effort to tell the story of what has happened there since Katrina. Sung by the legendary Irma Thomas, its opening stanza tells you what’s coming:

I’ll meet you on the corner of Dick Cheney Street

And Rumsfeld Boulevard,

Right next to the statue of Michael Brown,

In the new Ninth Ward.

As the song progresses, it’s clear its author is not a fan of the changes underway (nor should he be).

Folks are living so easy there,

Times used to be so hard,

A chicken in every pot,

Oh they dance a lot,

In the new Ninth Ward.

The song’s final stanza sums up the unique tragedy of modern New Orleans – a city with as much cultural heritage as any place in the United States, and a city with as much need of civic improvement.

We kicked out all the criminals,

Got rid of the blight,

Put a little camera on the traffic light,

The kids that come to school

They come to learn and not fight,

This time around we’re making it right,

In the new Ninth Ward.

What makes Treme so redeeming is its refusal to give the chief architects of the post-Katrina clusterfuck a free pass, and its insistence that we not delude ourselves into seeing those architects as being separate from the rest of us. We have met the enemy, and it is us. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we may actually figure out a way to be free. Until that happens, get ready – a new Ninth Ward is coming your way soon.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How to Balance the Art & Science of Teaching

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on How to Balance the Art & Science of Teaching

Recently, I gave a TED talk outlining why I think we’re in the midst of the most exciting and difficult time to be a teacher in American history. These sorts of talks are always imperfect (and timed) efforts to inject new ideas into the stratosphere, but I received lots of nice comments and feedback, including some observations that only a mom – my mom, actually – would share (“Your posture was very relaxed, and you never even said ‘um’!”).

It was another thing my mother said that struck me, though. “Do you feel sure that your audience knows what to do with all you’ve said?” she wrote.

Great point, and I’m not sure. So here, as simply as I can say it, are three specific things – some big, some small – we need to do to help teachers get better at helping children learn and grow.

1. Follow the Med School Model – As any M.D. knows, different medical 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 – whether they’re traditional schools of education or alternative certification programs – give short shrift to one of the most important things a teacher needs to know: child and adolescent development.

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.

So let’s start there by urging all teacher-training programs to adapt the Med School model and establish a similar two-course foundation for all prospective educators: Learning Sciences and Developmental Sciences.

I realize that won’t happen anytime soon (if at all). But the good news is we don’t need to wait; we can just start establishing online and/or in-person courses anywhere and everywhere, for anyone that’s interested in acquiring a deeper understanding of this new knowledge base. These courses would provide recommended reading, a forum for people to communicate with some guided facilitation, and a space for learners to self-organize with each other based on their areas of interest. And while it would be great if some accrediting body offered participants credit toward a degree or certification, we don’t need to wait for that to happen, either. What matters is identifying what we need to learn to be more effective at what we do, and then learning it. Period.

2. Study the Brain – In the same way educators need a solid foundation in how people develop, we should be equally aware of how people learn. That’s why schools and districts should incentivize any efforts on the part of their teachers to better understand the brain – regardless of whether it’s a book club or an accredited course. And once again, we can start right away in any community, alone or in groups. There are scores of recently written books that translate the latest insights in neuroscience for a lay audience. So we don’t need to wait for the schools of education to catch up. But we do need to do our homework and make sure we’re creating classroom environments that are highly tuned to our students’ strengths and weaknesses and how they see the world.

3. Craft Evaluation Programs That Honor Art & Science – One thing 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 already 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. That’s why we should blow them all up and start over.

A prerequisite of any new evaluation system should be its effort to help teachers improve the quality of their practice via shared inquiry into what is and isn’t working in their classrooms. These new systems shouldn’t be afraid of quantitative measures, just as they shouldn’t devalue qualitative measures. And we should be sure to pay attention to the illustrative efforts already underway. If you’re a policymaker, for example, take a close look at what they’re doing in Montgomery County. And if you’re a teacher, consider getting certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching 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 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 today.

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.)