Business Model Reforms Deserve a Second Look
"Business Model" reforms are particular types of education reform efforts that tend to focus on accountability and competition as mechanisms for change. These reforms borrow heavily from the business world. Business Model Reformers tend to see the free market as a perfect system, in that it eliminates the weak and rewards the strong or effective businesses, thereby increasing the health of the entire system (natural selection). In short, business model reformers believe schools would improve if they were run more like businesses.
I think it is fair to mark the establishment of Teach For America as the seminal event in Business Model reform. It drastically increased the competitive environment for teaching jobs in many urban areas and renewed the interest in teacher accountability. TFA soon spawned many more busines model reforms. Now they can boast a Superintendant in a major urban district (Michelle Rhee in Washington, D. C.) as well as the most respected school improvement innitiative in the KIPP schools.
But as the business world has crumbled over the last few months it may be time to take a second look at Business Model education reforms. The philosophical basis of these reforms are now in question. We were told that competition brought on by charter schools and voucher programs would purify our educational system as it purifies the free market. Now we know that competition is a mirage in some cases. Companies that are "too big to fail" are insulated from it and can find ways to side-step competition. We were told that effective teachers should get bonuses because in the business world the best work earns the best pay. Now we know that bonus systems can be corrupted and seem as likely to reward well-connected criminals as they are hard working innovators. We were told that standardized tests would give us numbers that cannot lie, on which we can base an accountable system of evaluation. Now we know that numbers can be made to lie if the motives of greedy individuals are strong enough.
As our market economy recovers, with much government help, it is important to remember education. Those who believe our schools should be modeled after our businesses can offer some insight. But it is important to remember that, while the closing of a factory is a shame, the failure of a system to secure a child's future is a tragedy. Competition in business requires some to fail, the future of our nation requires all children to have an opportunity to succeed in acquiring an education.
Innovations in Education
A few days ago there was a front page article in the New York Times about a teacher who was using stand-up desks in her classroom, maybe fifth graders . These desks looked like regular desks except they were obviously taller. The kids could stand behind them or use a stool for sitting. I think the teacher had designed the desks herself and her desks were gaining popularity throughout her district.
The idea was simple, to get kids to stop fidgeting in their seats they could stand instead. According to teachers using the desks the kids were more focused when they stood and had more energy. The desks had the added benefit of helping kids burn a few more calories then they would in a normal sitting desk. In short, this is a noteworthy educational innovation --it helps kids stay focused and improves student health at the same time. As the teachers said, "you never see a kid with his head down at a stand-up desk."
I'm happy anytime I see a positive article in the paper about teachers and I thought this was a really neat story. I'm not sure if it is front page news, but I'm no editor. But I couldn't help thinking, "is this what innovation looks like in our profession? New kinds of desks?"
Where are the innovations in curriculum, instruction, behavior management, materials, classroom culture and the learning environment? Are the brains of the leaders in our profession so drained that the best we can come up with is stand-up desks? Or worse, is the system we use to educate our kids designed to resist innovations?
We still use IQ tests to gauge the "intelligence" of our students when determining their need for special services. I think the IQ test dates to 1938, or there abouts. We still call kindergarten, well, kindergarten. Isn't that a 19th century German approach to education? Sure we have gone from chalkboards to smart boards in many classrooms, but has that really changed anything?
According to the teacher from the article, she has taught for around 20 years and one day the idea of stand up desks simply came to her. Really? Really. 20 years and she came up with stand up desks? Maybe we need some incentives for teachers to speed up the innovation cycle a little bit. Maybe growth, change and innovation need to be important in our educational system.
Two Upcoming Issues
The two issues are the “achievement gap,” and the relationship between knowledge and character.
The “achievement gap” is the gap between the test scores of middle and upper class, mostly white, mostly suburban students, and the test scores of low-income, mostly black and Hispanic, urban and rural students. It corresponds to the future income gap between these groups and the more general social gap that signifies quality of life. It has become the primary focus of many education reform projects.
The relationship between character and knowledge is the engine of most character education programs. Achievement via test scores is the measuring stick for schools these days and the impact of character education on this achievement provides the data that justifies most programs.
Conventional wisdom about the achievement gap says that the gap exists as a symptom of other societal ills: poverty, the breakdown of family, racism, employment opportunities, etc. There are already lots of very smart, highly motivated and well funded reformers attacking the problem from this angle, so I’m exploring another perspective. What if the achievement gap is not a symptom, but a cause of societal ills?
I think of the achievement gap as an expression of our apparent, collective intention to keep our society segmented. In other words, it’s a shell game that the well-to-do know how to win. Perhaps our educational system has become a mechanism for maintaining the divisions in our society (other mechanisms might include white-flight from cities creating, middle class, mostly white suburbs and consumption taxes that disproportionately affect low-income individuals on items such as alcohol, cigarettes and gasoline).
Our society did not change immediately after the Civil Rights Act was signed. We took down the “whites only” signs from the drinking fountains but then we developed new and less obvious ways to segregate groups. Our schools became the filters for separating socio-economic classes. We now subject our children to excessive, punitive “standardized” tests and draw conclusions that justify and exacerbate the separation between groups. And when we try to close the gap by increasing achievement on the low end, it only opens further at the other end with changes in educational “standards” and learning objectives.
So what do we do about it? I have no idea. If my upside-down perspective holds water one possible approach could be to de-emphasize standardized tests in schools serving low-income families. Stop trying to hit the moving target of “achievement” and focus on something we can control: the growth in character of our low-income students. I’m not advocating ignoring academics; I’m just saying we take the more deliberate route toward achievement by encouraging the expression of good character, thereby creating life long, responsible, independent learners.
As for the relationship between character and knowledge the current debate revolves around which comes first. Do kids pressed to acquire knowledge develop character as they learn to understand the world and themselves, or do kids who focus on character first thereby unlock their abilities to acquire knowledge?
The current debate favors the knowledge first approach. Character education programs are supplements to knowledge based curricula and usually rank far behind standard electives such as physical education and music and art classes. Certain studies tell us that students with good grades and those who are involved in positive extra-curricular activities are less likely to steal, cheat or lie. But the studies really do not show which came first, the good grades or the good character.
Sometimes this relationship is seen as a chicken and egg problem. Which came first, knowledge or character, is a conundrum that seems pointless to even try to untangle. Obviously they are correlated, but how?
I try to take a similar approach to this problem as I do with the achievement gap. I advocate for the less popular perspective, that character comes before knowledge. I believe that most high achievers perform well academically because they have been encouraged to express good character in the past and rely on their character during academic pursuits. So, by encouraging character in all of our students we can drastically improve the academic performance of every child.
Both of these issues are huge topics that I will get back to later. If anyone has any input on either issue it would be appreciated.
A Crisis of Character
This blog is connected to my website, www.starstudentprogram.com. The website is based on my experience building my own character education program for my students in an urban, public school in New Orleans. The blog is intended to be a forum for the discussion of character education issues.
Having just started this blog I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to delve into current events. With everything that’s going on right now, I can’t resist. Our nation is in a crisis, but not simply an economic crisis. We are in a crisis of character.
The free market economy is not so different from a regular, old produce market. If I buy an apple, and it turns out to be rotten, I’m not buying another one from the same guy. Our economic system is built on trust. Trust develops slowly, as I buy my apples from a guy with good apples week after week after week.
Many mortgage lenders and buyers left their character out of the market transaction and it is now costing our nation trillions of dollars. They bought and sold rotten apples. Banks are collapsing because no one can trust them anymore. They don’t even trust each other. They are engulfed in a crisis of character.
Every crisis is a crisis of character. I was unlucky enough to live in New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit the city. Many government officials acted without character to turn a manageable natural event into national crisis. From our former president to the levee builders and inspectors, too many individuals failed to take their responsibilities seriously. It had profound implications for the lives of millions.
Don’t get me wrong. Katrina would have been nasty by any measure. But the levees did not have to fail. People did not have to sit stranded on roof tops and in the Superdome for days. The social contract that holds our country together collapsed.
Now the contracts on thousands, if not millions, of homes have collapsed because they were based on nothing of true value. No trust, no integrity. Huge corporate banks compounded the problem by selling these toxic contracts on a global scale. Now the world is engulfed in a crisis of character.
It didn’t have to be this way. You rarely read the news reports of the crises that didn’t happen. You’ll never know the names of many individuals in various professions, in every era, who stepped up and acted with character to avoid disasters.
I can’t help think of Sully the pilot who successfully ditched a plane in the Hudson River recently, saving over 150 lives. Could he have done that if he had not developed his character as a pilot and a human being throughout his life? I doubt it. Meanwhile, nearby on dry land, Bernie Madoff is still sneaking his valuables to family members and still living in his penthouse apartment. A single man created a 50 billion dollar crisis because of his lack of good character.
By some measures our public schools have been in crisis for over a hundred years. The only way to get out of this crisis is to act with character and to teach the understanding and meaningful expression of character to our young students. Someday they may be the individuals that you never read about because they saved their local community, or maybe their nation, maybe the world, from the next crisis of character.
A New Voice
January 20, 2009
I’ve seen a lot of credit go out to all those who made it possible for Barrack Obama to be sworn in today. One article said Jackie Robinson and the black pioneers of professional sports got the ball rolling. Another gave unusual credit to Hollywood for the number of presidential roles given to African American actors in recent years, despite the systematic exploitation of minority groups that epitomized the entertainment industry for most of its existence. From Oprah to Bill Cosby, and from Barbara Jordan to Jesse Jackson, many voices contributed to the song that will be sung today. In each slave rebellion and civil rights march the seeds of this day were sown.
There is a group, however, that seems to have been forgotten. I have not seen any credit given to them. I can’t say I’m surprised. It’s what I’ve come to expect, actually. I have yet to see anyone recognize the job that teachers have done to make this day possible.
And who has done more? Who supplemented biased history books to include more coverage of slavery? Who insisted on telling both sides of the story of western expansion across America? Who spends extra hours learning the basics of 2nd and 3rd and 4th languages in order to accommodate and include the children of immigrant families?
Unfortunately, teachers have also been agents of the oppressive majority at times, supporting the status quo and inflicting damage on nascent movements. But for every ten of these types, there is one that stands up for the future of our nation and its children. And the impact of these future-thinking teachers is heavily felt by our students. Their impression stands out against the foggy backdrop of disinterested educators who go along to get to summer vacation.
Whenever I teach history to my students, I inevitably day dream about living in another American Era. I think to myself that I’d rather see first hand a band of rebels fighting to form a nation, an industrial boom, a westward expansion, a fight to maintain national unity, a transportation revolution from trains to planes and automobiles, a noble war fought to secure freedom for the future of mankind, or an equally noble civil struggle to secure freedom for men and women within our own borders.
It took a man with an unusual name and a typically muddled American background to wake me up to the excitement of our time. His rallying call is change, his fundamental message is redemption and he begins to lead our nation at a time when the greatest challenge facing us is not a war or an economic crisis, but the very sustainability of a culture based on democracy.
Sustainability is the issue of our era, I believe. Two elements of Obama’s persona, change and redemption, are also elements of sustainability. To survive a nation must change, with change mistakes inevitably come, redemption then follows to make the mistakes of our past bearable.
The sustainability of our nation, our environment, our democracy and our culture depends on a renewed commitment by all of us to act with positive character. I’ve started this blog and this website (on this day) because I want to encourage the growth and expression of positive character in our elementary school students. This is my modest attempt to inspire positive change and redemption in our country, with eyes on a sustainable future. The redemption of a nation can start with the call of one voice, but can end, just as quickly, if there’s no reply. This is my reply, even if my voice is just a whisper.
Coming Soon
Star Student Program blog on Character Education in Elementary Schools
