Watch TED Talks Education on PBS. See more from TED Talks Education.

In many respects, the growth of TED has mirrored our own growing interest in, well, ourselves. Although it technically started in 1984, TED didn’t really find its sea legs until the annual conference format began in 1990. And it didn’t really take off until it started posting videos of its talks online, in 2006.

One of those early videos introduced the world to a funny and insightful Englishman named Sir Ken Robinson. Ken’s clarity of thought, his humor, and his looseness combined to give us an emotionally powerful indictment of the Industrial model of schooling. The strength of that talk has turned Ken, rightly, into a global phenomenon (full disclosure: he’s a good friend).

But here’s the thing: when Ken was addressing that conference hall back in 2006, he wasn’t angling for a book deal. He had no illusions that his words might someday be played in small villages in Kenya, or across the giant television screens of Times Square. He was merely trying to share, in the spirit of TED’s founding, an idea worth spreading. And he did.

The problem is that now, anyone that gives a TED talk (further disclosure: I’ve given two) has in the back of their mind that they might become the next big thing. This has led to a flaw in most new talks — call it the Curse of Over-Curation. Every slide, every sentence, is rehearsed and revised to such a point that no room is left over for spontaneity and wit — the very things that made Ken’s first talk so powerful. As a result, shows like TED Talks Education feel less like a platform for ideas worth spreading, and more like the stage of a new reality show competition in which contestants are competing against each other to give the most inspiring speech.

When you think about it, that makes sense. After all, TED’s rise has coincided with the rise of reality television, and the lionization of the everyman celebrity. Survivor got the ball rolling in 2000. But the peak/nadir of the format began the same year Ken gave his famous talk — 2006 — with the debut of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County (now in its 8th season).

Now there are as many reality shows, with folks like you and me, as there are scripted ones, with folks very unlike you and me. Photographs of Snooki and Kim Kardashian are as important to Us Magazine as shots of Gwyneth Paltrow or Tom Cruise. And our society’s insatiable lust for celebrity has penetrated everything from teen motherhood to old celebrities wanting to recapture the glory of a time when everybody knew their name (no matter the cost).

Perhaps the format of this particular show — a special on Education — underscored the evanescence and incongruity of  TED’s “sage on the stage” format. After all, we know a lot now about how people learn best (actively) and how problems best get solved (by groups, not individuals). Is giving a select group of people eighteen minutes to wow us with their presentation skills — and making the rest of us sit silently in the shadows — really the change we seek?

TED was a major player in expanding our collective sense of possibility, in elevating the power of ideas, and in providing people a platform to build and sustain an audience for their work. In its current form, it had a great run. And now it’s time for a reboot.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

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Now imagine that the leader in question is not just prominent locally, but nationally as well. Imagine that this individual has appeared on the cover of iconic news magazines and been interviewed on Oprah’s iconic couch. And imagine that this person has come to embody a singular approach to determining the effectiveness of schools and teachers – the rationale for which would be challenged if the allegations of mistreatment were ever proven to be true.

Would you want to know if any actual wrongdoing had occurred?

In fact this is not a hypothetical question, but an actual one we can apply to the nation’s capital, and to our nation’s most visible school reformer, Michelle Rhee. It is, therefore, a question fraught with potential implications for how we think about (and assess) modern American education reform. And it’s a question that has been given new life in the wake of PBS reporter John Merrow’s publication of a confidential memo in which an outside consultant suggested that as many as 191 teachers, scattered across nearly half the city’s public schools, may have erased and corrected their students’ answers on the city’s high-stakes standardized test, the DC-CAS, in 2008.

No one in a position of authority to inquire further is doing so – yet.  Both Mayor Vincent Gray and David Catania, the chairman of the D.C. Council’s education committee, say they do not plan to reinvestigate – even though all previous investigations forbade any sort of erasure analysis or an examination of the original answer sheets. Rhee herself, a self-described “data fiend,” stands by her original statement: “I don’t recall receiving a report  . . . regarding erasure data from the DC-CAS.”

The significance of a potentially uninvestigated cheating scandal in Washington extends beyond the personal reputation of Ms. Rhee. Other cities around the country have already suffered their own scandals, from El Paso to Atlanta. Increasing numbers of parents are opting their children out of standardized tests as a form of civil disobedience to what they see as the deleterious results of the high-stakes testing era. And anyone who spends serious time in schools knows how many educators are struggling to stay motivated in a policy climate that, albeit unintentionally, disincentivizes them from valuing anything other than literacy and numeracy.

If no subsequent investigation occurs, we will be witness in Washington D.C. to what happens when powerful people try to sweep uncomfortable subjects under the rug. Ironically, however, Atlanta has demonstrated what happens when the opposite occurs – and courageous public officials, combined with a watchful free press, commit to uncover the truth, whatever it may be. As Georgia Governor Nathan Deal (a Republican) put it: “When test results are falsified and students who have not mastered the necessary material are promoted, our students are harmed, parents lose sight of their child’s true progress, and taxpayers are cheated.”

Deal’s investigative team was equally forceful: “Superintendent Beverly Hall and her senior staff knew, or should have known, that cheating and other offenses were occurring,” they wrote in their 813-page report – a report based on interviews with more than 2,000 people and a review of more than 800,000 documents. “A culture of fear and conspiracy of silence infected (the) school system and kept many teachers from speaking freely about misconduct.” As a lead member of the Atlanta investigative team told Merrow earlier this year, “There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that adults cheated in Washington. The big difference is that nobody in D.C. wanted to know the truth.”

Whether or not widespread cheating occurred in 2008 should matter greatly to all of us, even in 2013. What matters more is whether we are willing to find out. Because when we lose the courage and the curiosity to inquire deeply into our own practices – and the unintended consequences they may reap – we lose the capacity to reimagine education for a changing world.

(This article also appeared on the Smartblog on Education.)

The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the least likely path towards achieving imaginative and effective policy. Despite public stereotypes of the profession, K-12 education is a complex web of cognitive, social, emotional, language, ethical and physical challenges and opportunities. Its systemic barriers to change are as myriad as our complicated shared memories of what schooling is (and is not). And it’s a field in the midst of a major paradigmatic shift – away from the traditional notion that a student’s job is to adjust to the school, and towards the radical notion that a school’s job is to adjust to the student.

So while it’s true that the final stages of policymaking involve a certain amount of legalese, Mr. Catania’s belief that this process should start with a team of lawyers – and not end with one – speaks to a fundamental missed opportunity, and the second reason it’s a bad idea: We are ignoring the wisdom of our own community, and the chance to imagine DC’s future education policy as a city-wide, regenerative civic event.

Of course, surfacing and applying the insights of our own community is not something we do often – perhaps because so many of us secretly agree with Thomas Carlyle, who famously said: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

The thing is, Carlyle was wrong. As New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki writes in his 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds, “If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual.”

In other words, when our imperfect individual judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often extremely helpful. That’s why Surowiecki suggests, “we should stop hunting and ask the crowd. Chances are, it knows.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Mr. Catania is doing – hunting. It’s an impulse so common sociologists have given it its own name: “Chasing the Expert,” which references our tendency when facing difficult decisions to search for that one person (or small group of people) who will have the answer.

What Surowiecki discovered was that the opposite was true, but only if the core conditions of making a good large-group decision were present: diversity, independence, and a particular form of decentralization. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

Imagine if instead of seeking outside funds to hire a small team of lawyers, Catania had announced a citywide initiative in which the best wisdom around crowdsourcing would be utilized in order to help the entire community arrive at a thoughtful, informed collective decision around the future of education policy? After all, politics is about the impact of government on the everyday lives of citizens. Why do we think the way to do it well is by distancing ourselves from the voices of the citizens themselves?

Indeed, the most damning implication of Mr. Catania’s decision is his inattention to the mechanisms of democracy, to the wisdom of the community, and to the regenerative power of combining both in an effort to improve public education. As Surowiecki writes, democracy “is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental questions of cooperation and coordination: How do we live together? How can living together work to our mutual benefit?”

“The decisions that democracies make may not always demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd,” Surowiecki concedes. “But the decision to make them democratically does.”

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

Watch 180 Days : A Year Inside an American High School Episode 1 on PBS. See more from 180 Days.

As Pedro Noguera said, “unmet social needs become unmet academic needs.”

As soon as everything from federal education policy to the KIPP Network’s six essential questions includes, and transcends, academic measures of success, we’ll have a chance at reimagining education for a changing world.

Until then, make no mistake — we’re kidding ourselves, and the best we can hope for is a perfecting of our ability to succeed in a system that no longer serves our interests.

Listen.

I can’t, I won’t, I can’t, I won’t
Let you leave
I don’t know what you want
You want more from me?

She said to him
“I want you to be a father
He’s your little boy and you don’t even bother
Like “brother” without the R
And he’s starting to harbor
Cool and food for thought
But for you he’s a starver
Starting to use red markers on his work
His teacher say they know he’s much smarter
But he’s hurt
Used to hand his homework in first
Like he was the classroom starter
Burst to tears
Let them know she see us
Now he’s fighting in class
Got a note last week that say he might not pass
Ask me if his daddy was sick of us
Cause you ain’t never pick him up
You see what his problem is?
He don’t know where his poppa is
No positive male role model
To play football and build railroad models
It’s making a hole you’ve been digging it
Cause you ain’t been kicking it
Since he was old enough to hold bottles
Wasn’t supposed to get introduced to that
He don’t deserve to get used to that
Now I ain’t asking you for money or to come back to me
Some days it ain’t sunny but it ain’t so hard
Just breaks my heart
When I try to provide and he say ‘Mommy that ain’t your job’
To be a man, I try to make him understand
That I’m his number one fan
But its like he born from the stands
You know the world is out to get him, so why don’t you give him a chance?”

So he said to him
“I want you to be a father
I’m your little boy and you don’t even bother
Like “brother” without the R
And I’m starting to harbor
Cool and food for thought
But for you I’m a starver
Starting to use red markers on my work
My teacher say they know I’m much smarter
But I’m hurt
I used to hand my homework in first
Like I was the classroom starter
Burst to tears
Let them know he see us
Now I’m fighting in class
Got a note last week that say I might not pass
Kids ask me if my daddy is sick of us
Cause you ain’t never pick me up
You see what my problem is?
That I don’t know where my poppa is
No positive male role model
To play football and build railroad models
It’s making a hole you’ve been digging it
Cause you ain’t been kicking it
Since I was old enough to hold bottles
Wasn’t supposed to get introduced to that
I don’t deserve to get used to that
Now I ain’t asking you for money or to come back to me
Some days it ain’t sunny but it ain’t so hard
Just breaks my heart
When my momma try to provide and I tell her ‘That ain’t your job’
To be a man, she try to make me understand
That she my number one fan
But its like you born from the stands
You know the world is out to get me, why don’t you give me a chance?”