The 21st Century Principal

Over the years, as the waves of new reform efforts, federal policy initiatives, and latest educational fads have ebbed and flowed, all of them have been met by critics who questioned their efficacy and their logic. I've been one of those critics myself. What has always fascinated me was the defense of these sometimes reform measures. Take value-added measures for example.

When the statistical wizardry of value-added measures emerged, I distinctly remember their being justified as "the best measurement we've got"when their efficacy was questioned. Does anyone else see the error in that justification? Being the "best we've got" doesn't necessary make it the most effective and best means to measure learning and teaching. Rubbing two sticks together to make fire was the "best we had" until someone figured out flint rocks work better. The "best we've got" rationale doesn't necessarily equate with being effective or even right.

The next time someone uses the "best-we've-got" rationale to justify an educational practice of any kind, we should immediately call them out.

"You got to use the power that you got." Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Most of us face situations where success seems impossible or improbable. Many of these situations involve what Malcolm Gladwell calls "Goliaths." These are adversaries or adverse conditions that appear to be insurmountable. In education, we often find ourselves in these "Goliath" situations where our initial assessment is that we can't possibly succeed, because we are out-manned, out-resourced, and out-powered, but according to Gladwell all is not lost. At the heart of our problem is our misconceptions about the situation and about who really has the power.

So what can we do? According to Gladwell, we can do the following:

• Rethink the idea of what an "advantage" is. Conventional wisdom sometimes tells us what is an advantage. For example, being a small school might seem to place that school at a disadvantage. It might not be able to offer all the extra-curricular activities, classes, and programs that a much larger school would be able to offer. Yet, the "advantage" the smaller school might have has to do with its ability to be more flexible, and hence change and improvements might be implemented much easier and more quickly than in a larger school. Nimbleness is certainly the case with smaller schools with smaller staffs. Often they can react more quickly and gracefully to changing conditions. We can as Gladwell tells us, turn our disadvantages into advantages.
• Change the rules. Often, in the midst of situations where we face adverse conditions, and we feel that loss is eminent, we feel hopeless. We feel hopeless because, in that situation, if we play by the rules, we are certain to lose. But, who said we had to play by these rules? Why can't we change them, modify them, and approach the adversity in an entirely new manner? Like the David and Goliath story, David chose not to engage the giant in a conventional manner, because he would have surely lost. Instead, he fought unconventionally and in a way his adversary wasn't expecting and won. Changing the rules is climbing out of the box systems put us in and reinventing the game. When you're faced with a sure loss, what do you have to lose?
• Use what you have. All of us in adversarial situations facing sure defeat, begin to engage in "What-if" thinking, such as, "What if we had more computers?" Or, "What if we had more money for teacher salaries?" The rest of those questions are outcomes we would like to see. Sometimes, though, in the face of adverse and adversarial conditions and sure loss, we have to turn to what we have, and often what we have and what we control is more than we think. For example, if you want a 1:1 computer program and can't find funding to purchase computers for every student, then "use what you have." Perhaps enough students have their own computers and you can open your network for BYOD and just purchase computers for those who can't afford them. This accomplishes the goal by "using what you got."

"The core purpose of education is to prepare young people for life after school; helping them to build up the mental, emotional, social, and strategic resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexity." Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education

Every time I hear education reform rhetoric calling for education reforms that "Prepare students for jobs of the 21st century," or reforms that "prepare them for jobs that don't exist yet," I can't help but ask: "What the heck does that look like? How can we prepare students for something we don't even know will come to pass?" These are really shortsighted and, if I may say, stupid ideas.

Education prophets and gurus have been spouting their prophecies and oracles since just before the turn of the century. I won't get into mentioning their names, but many of these have made fortunes peddling their prophecies of economic gloom and doom at education conferences and workshops worldwide, charging exorbitant speaking fees and selling books.

The truth is, "Is any of this blather rather productive? Is it really the role of schools to prepare students by training them for the jobs that currently exist, or will exist in the near future? My answer to that question is a loud and boisterous "NO."

Training students for existing jobs is setting them up for future failure because such jobs disappear according to the changing whims of corporations. Do we train students for jobs that we think are going to become important? My answer again is a resounding "Negative!" It is educational malpractice to be gambling with the lives of kids by teaching them what we think they will be doing 10 years or 20 years or 30 years from now. We aren't seers and haven't reliable crystal balls, so we can't play games with the lives of those we teach.

I agree with Ken Robinson. The core of our job as educators is to prepare them for "Life after school." It's really that simple. They don't need to be narrowly pigeonholed into existing jobs or jobs that "might" exist. They need the "mental, emotional, social and strategic resources" to live in a world that none of us really know about. Instead of rolling the dice with the lives of those we teach, we need to provide an education that allows them to face the unknown.

"Since the formation of the United States of America, there has been debate over the roles and purposes of education." Christopher Tienken & Donald Orlich, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies

Because educational policymakers were so successful in using the Sputnik incident in promoting new education policy and change, it seems we have a new "Sputnik-moment" every 10 years or so, and with Arne Duncan, we seem to have one every time the latest round of PISA scores are released. According to him, our schools have been in a crisis since he came into office. Like education-researchers David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, one can't help but wonder whether or not this is a "Manufactured Crisis" which was the title of their book back in 1996. It would almost seem that Duncan and his fellow corporate reformers are using the same Sputnik playbook to push their tired, worn-out educational reform agenda of more standards, more tests and lots of airy rhetoric. Even in 1996, Berliner and Biddle tackled head-on the myths about declining achievement in national test scores and rising illiteracy rates. They painstakingly pointed out where the media, pundits and policymakers were getting it wrong. Even then, the myths continued unabated and many of them have continued through to this day.

At the heart of all reform efforts today is a both a fundamental disagreement on the nature of schools: it purposes and reasons for existence. Also at the heart of reform efforts by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and many others are what Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich describe, in their book The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myths, and Lies, as the "Eight Self-Evident Fallacies of the Modern Reform Movement." These eight fallacies are at the heart of current education policy from increased standardized testing, using of test scores in teacher evaluations, implementation of the Common Core Curriculum, and our incessant focus on accountability. These eight fallacies, according to Tienken and Orlich have their roots stretching all the way back to the Sputnik incident. I include their fallacies here with my commentary and I've taken the liberty of adding one of my own fallacies.

• "Fallacy 1: Government coercion will accelerate achievement." This myth believes that the only way to get educators and students to improve is through coercion, whether through sanctions or rewards. One would think that this same fallacious thinking would have folded after the miserable failure of No Child Left Behind, but it survives and has only spurred an even more high-stakes environment where teachers and students are now subjected to greater penalties and more testing than ever. At the heart of this fallacy is the belief that teachers and students do not work hard so we have to make them work harder. What government coercion is doing to teaching in North Carolina, and I suspect elsewhere is encouraging more who would might show an interest in becoming a teacher to seek some other more hospitable profession. Who wants to teach with the gun of accountability and test scores stuck to your head?
• "Fallacy 2: Big business values will improve public education." This fallacy puts faith in the business model as a way of saving education. It says that education will improve through competition and an intense focus on the bottom-line. It views teachers as expendable just as business and industry currently views their own employees. In the business model, workers are to do as they're told. In education, the same: teachers are not to question the latest policy, curriculum or reforms. Just do them!
• "Fallacy 3: Intuitively derived standards can replace empirically derived solutions." The standards movement, according to Tienken and Orlich are examples of authoritarianism. The entire thinking is, "We must raise our standards! We must raise our standards! We must raise our standards!" Instead of looking for the difficult solutions to improving education, our policymakers and politicians take the easy way out and develop one more set of standards. The problems in our schools involve child poverty, lack of resources, and a dwindling number of qualified teachers among many other things. Raising the standards in those situations does absolutely nothing to resolve the real issues we face.
• "Fallacy 4: Standards are technical specifications being confused with, but applied to human learning capabilities." The whole philosophy behind the standards movement is that students are passive vessels into which what is to be learned is poured. Standards ignore that students have an active role to play in learning. Learning is a mechanistic process, not an organic process. Under this fallacy, "schools are assembly lines of knowledge" and students are sped through on a conveyor belt and learning is done to them as they pass through. Standards ignore the human side of learning entirely and view it as a process to which students are subjected.
• "Fallacy 5: High-stakes, state-mandated testing and assessment programs will improve student learning." In spite of our country's obsession with testing and accountability, our PISA scores have remained flat. Our College Board testing scores haven't dramatically increased. (That's if testing is the right measure of achievement, which I am not convinced that they are.) Testing has not resulted in higher graduation rates. It has resulted in fostering a massive culture of distrust with teachers as professionals. State-mandated testing and accountability systems have ultimately turned our schools into places where little else matters.
• "Fallacy 6: All high school students will benefit from being enrolled in college preparatory programs." This fallacy just isn't true. While statistically, college degree earners might earn more, it doesn't follow that they do, or that they can even get a job. There are countless college graduates unable to find jobs, and that are working in jobs with no better pay than non-college graduates. Additionally, to believe that every student is capable of doing college level work isn't realistic and ignores reality.
• "Fallacy 7: Students and parents are unconcerned about the psychological abuses by one-sized  fits-all standards and testing." Most of parents want what's best for their children. Subjecting all students to a one-size-fits-all standardized education where their individual learning needs are discarded at testing time is malpractice. In time when we're standardizing everything in our schools, we should be personalizing. Assessments given to students that we know aren't going to be successful is idiotic. Our parents should be more upset about all the testing we do in schools., but they are not because our policymakers work hard to disguise all the testing done behind rhetoric, jargon, and even changing the names of tests.
• "Fallacy 8: Centralization of educational decision-making benefits our nation." Education needs in our country have always been specific to locale, and that hasn't changed. Our students need their needs met by responsive local school systems who can meet their needs without being encumbered by a mass of regulations coming from the US Department of Education and state departments of instruction. These bureaucracies may mean well, but they are always too far removed to see the effects of their latest rounds of decrees from on high have in the local school. The only thing centralization of educational decision-making benefits are those hungry for power. Big centralized bureaucratic education systems fail to meet the needs of individual students.