Rethink Learning Blog

(NOTE: This piece is also posted on http://www.samchaltain.com/blog)

On the radio this morning, I heard three different stories about public education reform. In each story, I heard the same three words — data, testing, and accountability.

Before I get any more depressed about how uninspiring this language makes me feel, I have a proposal to make: let’s stop the madness and start identifying some new words that can more accurately describe the changes we seek for children.

Fittingly, the person who first made me aware of the power of language was none other than William Shakespeare, whose plays I used to teach in a variety of classrooms across the boroughs of New York City.

Hamlet was always my favorite. He is, like most teenagers, a searcher, occasionally brooding and introspective. He has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist, an actor, and a dreamer – a person more comfortable in the world of words than the world of actions. And he is in love. But Hamlet is also the future King of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder – a duty that leads to his untimely death, in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read the play is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his nature or accepting the role society has assigned him. Hamlet’s struggle also illuminates an essential question of human nature, not coincidentally posed by the first two words of the play – “Who’s there?”

This is not a question many of us choose to ask of ourselves. Instead, we keep busy with work and other distractions. We ignore the inherent, unarticulated contradictions between our internal passions and our external actions. And we wonder why we are left feeling unfulfilled.

Everything we do as individuals is determined by who we think we are — or, in the case of school reform, by what we define as our ultimate goals. And yet part of Hamlet’s challenge is that throughout his struggle, his only recourse for greater self-understanding is to “unpack [his] heart with words.”

This tension between thoughts, words and actions continues throughout the play. At one point, Hamlet finds himself standing directly behind the man who killed his father – the King’s brother, Claudius. All the young prince needs to do is unsheathe his sword and complete his duty. But Hamlet feels paralyzed, even as he struggles to talk himself into the act. He tries to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action” – but to no effect. Later, Hamlet bemoans the futility of “words, words, words” – at once his (and our) greatest resource and chief source of frustration.

Shakespeare’s exploration of the relationship between thoughts, words and actions illuminates a universal human tension, and a particular challenge I see reflected in our current efforts to create a more equitable school system: Before any of us can use our talents to make ourselves seen and heard, we must first understand how to “suit the action to the word, [and] the word to the action.” And before we can ever hope to become the most effective teacher, parent, boss or school leader, we must be willing to do the internal, reflective work necessary to answer the question, “Who’s there?”

If I apply this question to the current reform landscape, it’s unquestionable that the words we use are somehow divorced from the essence of what schooling is all about — helping children unlock the mystery of who they are by acquiring the skills and self-confidence they need to be seen and heard (at college, in their careers, and as citizens in a democracy) in meaningful, responsible ways.

Why is the significance and power of this goal so absent from the most common vocabulary of the current reform movement? The optimistic side of me says it’s simply because we haven’t thought about it enough. The pessimistic side wonders if it’s because we’re so blinded by the current charade of labeling schools (or reform efforts) as successful or unsuccessful based on a single measure of success that we’ve come of believe our own press clippings: if the scores go up, we really are closing the achievement gap. If the scores stay stagnant or go down, we’ve made no progress whatsoever.

As anyone who has studied Shakespeare knows, a worthy plot line is more complicated than that. And so is the work we have ahead of us.

To get us started in the right direction, I have three simple proposals:

1. Every time you find yourself wanting to say data, say information instead. It’s a good thing, for example, that we’re more concerned now with acquiring relevant information about whether or not kids are learning, and how well or poorly our schools are creating healthy learning environments for kids. But the fact that schools now talk about “Data Days” at their school suggests to me that we’ve gone a little too far in the direction of valuing the number and not the story behind the number. We need both, and information strikes me as a more neutral term.
2. Every time you want to talk about testing, talk about learning instead. Tests will always be a component of our education system. But take a moment to reflect back on your most powerful personal learning experience, and I can guarantee you it did not involve a test. I know this because I was part of a powerful data-collection campaign — I mean, information-gathering campaign — to uncover the core conditions of a powerful learning environment, based on people’s lived experiences. After hundreds of individual stories were collected, the Rethink Learning Now campaign made a word cloud of the most essential conditions, and, no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention in their life, the top five were challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential. So let’s stop playing it safe and focusing on tests that can only skim the surface of what real learning looks like, and let’s start asking ourselves, relentlessly and collaboratively, How can we create more learning opportunities for kids that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive and experiential — and how will we know if we’ve succeeded?
3. Every time you want to talk about accountability, talk about sustainability instead. What we seek is not just a system that holds people accountable — after all, the most successful systems are the ones where people are intrinsically motivated to do that for themselves. No, what we seek is a system that can sustain its capacity to use meaningful information to improve the overall learning conditions for children. And in case you think this is flowery progressivism at its worst, you should know that I’m partially basing this notion on the insights of renown business guru Jim Collins, who says the best organizations create environments where employees need no motivation, and leaders trip up when they destroy that drive.

So how do we create such a climate for change? Well, one way would be to start paying more attention to the “words, words, words” we use, and to stop using language that is more likely to de-motivate people than connect them to the core mission of a high-quality public education. The changes we seek, after all, are to bring about a system that can help every child not just learn about “who’s there,” but also acquire the knowledge and skills that will allow them, over the long haul, “to thine own self be true.”

(This blog is also posted at www.samchaltain.com)

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.

I just saw The Lottery – a documentary film about public education in general, and the charter school movement in particular – and I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.

The film is beautiful, and deeply moving, It is impossible not to fall in love with the four children (and their families) whose bittersweet paths we follow in the lead-up to the lottery that decides who is admitted to Harlem Success Academy, a successful new charter school, and whose dream is, so randomly, denied.

I’m equally struck by the way the film further entrenches the “us v. them” mentality that is, I believe, one of the greatest challenges to our establishing a new system of public education that can truly serve the interests of the families in the film.  It is, in short, a film about heroes (the families and pro-charter school advocates) and villains (teachers’ unions and anti-charter advocates). And it’s asking you to pick sides.

Watching it, I found myself thinking of two great philosophers – Martin Buber and Mohandas K. Gandhi – and wondering what they would say about the tenor of our national movement, and what that tenor augurs for our children over the long-term.

It was Buber whose 1923 book I and Thou first suggested that all human beings interact with the world – and each other – in one of two ways:

• By seeing others in two-dimensional terms – as “I/It” – and by moving into a limited subject/object relationship; or
• By seeing others in three-dimensional terms – as ‘I/Thou” – and by moving into existence in a relationship without bounds.

Buber’s central message was that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. And it is only when we paint each other in human terms (“I/Thou”) that we create the conditions to support both personal and group transformation.

Similarly – and much more familiarly – Gandhi’s success as a leader stemmed from his faith in the principle of Satyagraha, a synthesis of the Sanskrit words Satya, or “truth,” and Agraha, or “holding firmly to.” As Gandhi explained it: “Satya implies love, and Agraha engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha . . . . I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion.”

Both Buber and Gandhi clearly understood what the producers of The Lottery do not – that to bring about a true revolution (as Gandhi did), we must lead with a fundamental respect for our opponents. We must, as Lincoln said, appeal to the “better angels” of our natures. And we must resist the ideological short cut of painting each other in two-dimensional terms.

Unfortunately, what I see taking shape nationally is exactly that. It’s a traditional paradigm of conflict, in which both sides (e.g., pro- or anti-union, pro- or anti-charter, etc.) seek to defeat the opponent or frustrate the opponent’s objectives. By contrast, Gandhi’s goal was “to convert, not to coerce, the wrong-doer.”

What if we heeded Gandhi’s advice and flipped the script? What if both sides started defining success as cooperating with our opponent to meet a just end – best personified by the families in The Lottery and their hopes for their children? And what if we did so by proactively interacting with each other through an “I/Thou” frame?

I’m not suggesting that by doing so, all of our problems would magically go away. To be sure, there are some real differences, and real obstacles, to reform. I am suggesting, however, that it may serve us all better if we start fighting fire with water by refusing to engage in the most off-base accusations that suck up the oxygen in our public discussions (from Arne Duncan conspiracy theories to the notion that a union supporter can’t really want what’s good for kids). We’re all educators, after all, committed to careers in the service of children. Let’s all start acting like it.