Tag: michael fullan

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.)

In Chicago, Imagining a Different Ending

Posted on | by Sam | 6 Comments on In Chicago, Imagining a Different Ending

Now that the teacher strike in Chicago has ended – and the city’s schoolchildren have returned to school – one thing seems unavoidably clear: despite the agreement, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his city’s public school teachers will remain deeply divided, deeply mistrustful of one another, and deeply entrenched for the foreseeable future.

The good news is that the rest of us can learn something from the mistakes both sides in this particular melodrama have made. In fact, there are cities that have actually transformed their school systems for the better, and done so in a way that left everyone feeling good about (and committed to) the changes. To bring about such a shift, however, the central figures of reform – elected officials and teacher unions – must start thinking very differently about how transformational change occurs, and what it requires.

One place Chicago’s leaders might want to visit is the Canadian province of Ontario, which realized a few years ago that its school system needed some massive remodeling. Unlike Chicago, however, the key figures in Ontario understood that in order to improve their schools they needed to build collective capacity – which meant generating both the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone could ever match.

Educational change expert Michael Fullan was a part of the successful reforms in Ontario. In his book All Systems Go, Fullan explains why it worked: “The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.”

If the morality play in the Windy City had played out differently, each side would have heeded a different part of Fullan’s advice. Mayor Emanuel would have recognized the importance of fostering a deeper emotional commitment from the folks most responsible for seeing the reforms through – his city’s teachers. He would have realized the futility of pointing out that Chicago had one of the shortest school days in the country while also denigrating his city’s educators and putting them on the defensive from the moment he took office. And he would have genuinely welcomed educators into the process of reimagining what Chicago’s schools should look like. In short, he would have done what our civic leaders are supposed to do: foster eclectic coalitions that bring people together in a spirit of partnership to work towards a common goal.

By the same token, in a parallel world Chicago‘s teachers would have realized that a deeper level of technical expertise is required in modern American classrooms. They would have been the first to call for a longer school day – and they would have made sure the extra time was used wisely. They would have been the first to demand a better system of evaluation – and they would have made sure it actually helped teachers improve the quality of their professional practice. And they would have been the first to acknowledge the value of empowering each school principal to build his or her own teaching staff. In short, they would have done what our educators are supposed to do: help the rest of us understand what great teaching and learning actually looks like – and requires.

Instead, what we see in Chicago is a mayor primarily focused on the technical aspects of school reform, and a teaching force primarily driven by emotion. Ontario instructs us that it doesn’t need to be this way. But it will, in Chicago and elsewhere, until we heed some simple advice: How we speak, not just what we say, matters greatly. And until the tenor of our national conversation reflects a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain, in Chicago and elsewhere, agonizingly out of reach.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

All Systems Go!

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I hear people talking about the need for “systems change” and “systems thinking,” and when I do I always wonder what people mean when they say it.

My own interest in systems thinking began a few years ago when I read Peter Senge’s classic The 5th Discipline. It influenced me so much that I dedicated a full chapter to the subject in my new book American Schools. Overall, though, I haven’t seen a lot of work in education based on systems thinking. But that seems to be changing.

I’m particularly excited about Michael Fullan’s new book, All Systems Go: The Change Imperative for Whole System Reform, which I just finished and highly recommend. Not surprisingly, the book begins with a foreword from Senge, who grounds the origins of our current system in the Industrial era. “That’s why they were organized like an assembly line,” he writes. “That’s why they were based on standardized timetables governing each part of the day (complete with bells and whistles on the walls), and fixed, rigid curricula delivered by teachers whose job was first and foremost to maintain control, much like an assembly-line foreman.” Senge urges us to imagine a very different challenge today. “The challenge of our time is not economic competitiveness. The challenge is to build not only “sustainable” but also regenerative societies — ones than enhance natural and social capital.”

Amen. And in the pages that follow, Fullan shows how that work is taking place in a number of different places around the world. He cuts to the chase on page one: “If there is one thing you should remember  . . . it is the concept of collective capacity,” which Fullan defines as “generating the emotional commitment and the technical expertise that no amount of individual capacity working alone can come close to matching.”

Fullan says, and I agree, that collective capacity is the hidden resource we fail to understand or cultivate. Instead, we overvalue single-resource strategies — making smaller classrooms, raising salaries, drafting common standards, etc. — when what we need is an investment in compound resource strategies. Smaller classrooms mean nothing, after all, unless the move is coordinated with relevant professional learning for teachers that helps them employ new teaching strategies. And adding national standards will mean nothing if the end result is merely more national exams and less high-quality locally driven assessments using the standards as a common frame. But this is what we do, over and over again. We’re playing a game of chess as though it’s checkers, making one move at a time.

This does NOT mean that all we need to do is give people more opportunities to collaborate. What Michelle Rhee understands, I think correctly, is that collaboration, or student voice, or democratic governance, is not an end in itself (as I alluded to in a previous post titled, “To What Do We Owe Our Fidelity?”) What is required instead, and what Rhee fails to grasp, is disciplined, strategically-employed collaboration that fosters a shared vision of how to create the optimal learning environment for children (and, by extension, adults). As Fullan writes: “Quality instruction requires getting a small number of practices right. These practices involve knowing clearly and specifically what each student can or cannot do, followed by tailored intervention that engages students in the particular learning in question, and then does the assessment-instruction-correction process on a continuous basis.”

Fullan provides myriad examples throughout the book, but a particularly illustrative one comes from Ontario, where government officials realized they needed to provide resolute leadership on some core priorities that could impact not just the government education agencies, but also district and local school leaders. The government realized that if it wanted to engage the whole system in a coherent, focused effort, it needed to do three things:

  1. focus on a small number of ambitious instructional goals
  2. create an instructional capacity capability to help coordinate the efforts of the many players (government, district and local ed leaders)
  3. change the culture of the state education ministry so that it had greater internal coherence and a commitment to work in a true two-way partnership

As someone living in DC, I read Fullan’s case study of Ontario and saw an immediate disconnect between what they did and where we’re headed. In particular, check out this quote:

The gist of the strategy is to mobilize and engage large numbers of people who are individually and collectively committed and effective at getting results relative to core outcomes that society values. It works because it is focused, relentless (i.e., stays the course), operates as a partnership between and across layers, and above all uses the collective energy of the whole group. There is no way of achieving whole-system reform if the vast majority of the people are not working on it together.

To me, that last word sums up why I worry that Michelle Rhee will not be able to move the city any further on its overall reform efforts. In work this massive and important, how we speak, and not just what we say, matters greatly. (This is what I was trying to get at in my recent review of the new film The Lottery as well.) Fullan’s book convincingly demonstrates that systemic reform is difficult but possible. It also demonstrates, once again, that until the tenor of our national conversation suggests a deep awareness of, and commitment to, working together to achieve results, our efforts at developing collective capacity will remain agonizingly out of reach.