Schools of Thought

When perusing the Education Evolving site (linked to by Eduwonk), I came across the text of some 2001 remarks by Joe Graba, a senior policy fellow at Hamline University and former deputy education commissioner in Minnesota. His comments about the difficulties of fundamental innovation in our current school system are worth quoting at length:

Folks, if we want to get the kind of learning that will do this job successfully, we will need some schools that are very different. And I am convinced that we cannot get these different schools by changing the ones we have. We will have to create the different schools new. A lot of people have observed and commented on the difficulty of changing organizations. Few have been able to explain why it is so hard. But two books recently have helped. One is The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. The other is Creative Destruction, by Richard Foster of McKinsey. Most organizations, Christensen says, are able to improve incrementally what they do. Radical – as opposed to incremental – change comes only through the creation of new organizations.

What he calls ‘sustaining’ innovations improve existing methods. But occasionally there are innovations that, if adopted, would disrupt existing methods, would require fundamental changes in the way the organization operates. Almost no organization, Christensen finds, is able to adopt the disruptive innovations. These innovations find a niche market somewhere else. And they improve. And then move up market. And threaten the established firms. We see examples of this all the time. The airlines disrupted the railroads; took the passengers away. I never heard of “Great Northern Airlines”. We got “Northwest Airlines’, a new organization. Why can’t the existing organizations change? Foster talks about every organization having a culture that becomes its “invisible architecture” and that is almost impossible to change. This is truly startling. It says that what are assets at the peak of an organization’s performance become liabilities when disruptive change occurs. The process that helped the organization do well in the earlier period constrain it from responding when it needs to respond.

Christensen also points to the influence of the mainline customers of the organization. They do not want it to change. He studied the disk-drive industry, in which no firm that was dominant at one stage made it successfully to the next stage. And this is not hard to understand. The customers who had invested in 14” disk drives wanted better 14” drives: They were not interested in 8” drives. Also, when they first appear, the new products seem lower in quality as well as different.

What does this mean for schools? Well, suppose you were a superintendent. A new idea for school is proposed. It would conflict with the culture of your existing organization, so nobody inside likes it. Nor do your mainline customers want it. What would you do? I have to say candidly: All of us here are a part of the problem. We are products of the mainline system. The traditional schools served us well. Most of us would prefer that the existing schools just get better. We would resist changing what we knew and liked. So the country ends up spending billions and we still have the schools we knew. Trying to change existing schools forces us into incremental change. The mainline customers and the forces inside resist radical change. I’ve seen this: As a legislator and later as an administrator I helped start and run the Minnesota’s Council on Quality Education, which underwrote innovative efforts in districts. We could innovate, but we found the innovations did not spread and that they were not sustained when the financing ended ... In education, too, we need to set up new operations outside the existing culture. The schools we have serve many students well; and these should continue. Note that Dayton’s didn’t close its department stores. They set up a new operation and let the customers choose.

Some of the leadership in public education sees this. Paul Houston, who heads the American Association of School Administrators, tells people not to confuse the church with the faith. Public education is a faith; a set of principles. The existing districts and their schools are ‘the church’; the institutional form. If we keep the faith, in that sense, it is OK to change the church, Houston says. The church is not the faith.

I think this is an incredibly important idea, and from what I've both read and experienced myself on all levels of The Cavalier Daily's culture, it seems about right. The problem is, American education doesn't have the ability to spin off Target from Dayton's -- we can't up and create entirely new organizations. Graba points to the charter movement as a partial solution, and I'm on board with that, except there are 100,000 schools in the U.S. and 40 million students to educate, and charters are likely never going to become mass institutions.

So the question in my mind shifts to one of how we perform fundamental, radical change when creating new organizations isn't a viable option. As I muse, I think that it's going to take a holistic effort: a deep understanding on part of every actor (teacher, parent, administrator, legislator, bureaucrat, voter, community, etc.) that such change is utterly necessary. That at some fundamental levels, Our. System. Is. Broken. And then on top of that there is going to have to be a generalizable, scalable alternative that is unimpeachably superior to the status quo. Then, with some fervered willpower and a little luck... well, who knows, maybe you can conquer the curse of incremental change.

I think charters (along with some fashion of school choice) can serve as important catalysts for this project, because they can act as laboratories to show that there's a better way. But they aren't the solution in and of themselves; in our unique challenge, the fundamental change is going to have to happen with the pre-existing institutions and their pre-existing cultures. Without acknowledging that obstacle and addressing it, no widespread reform is going to be successful.

Thoughts?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29, 2005 at 9:44 PM. |