A Failure of Empathy and the Preposterous Notion of 197 Shootings in Legislatures in the First 18 Years of This Century

"We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us."

- Robert Ebert, film critic

There have been 197 school shootings in the first 206 months of this century. Congress has not passed a single piece of legislation in response to the fact that more than 3 people are being shot in schools - more than one of them killed - each month. 

It is true that this problem of shootings in America is complicated. It is also true that high school students feel that trigonometry is complicated and yet we - rightfully - force them to work on trig problems. Shootings are complicated but not more than any of thousands of problems that are given out each day to millions of students. We ask them to solve these problems because it will make them better. 

A failure of empathy is the root of Congress's lack of response to this carnage. Let's do a simple thought experiment, changing out schools for legislatures.

There have been 197 shootings in legislative bodies in the first 206 months of this century. Congress has not passed a single piece of legislation in response to the fact that more than 3 people are being shot in congress - more than one of them killed - each month.

Does anyone believe that the above paragraph could ever exist in the real world? After just 19 shootings in legislatures - 19 stories about congresspeople rather than students or legislative aides rather than teachers - does anyone believe that new laws would not quickly be passed?

Maybe the most essential feature of any leaders is empathy. What help would you need if your mom were single and poor and you had no access to mentors? What help would you need if you were an aspiring entrepreneur without access to mentors? What would it be like to be faced with the prospect of 30 years of commuting an hour each way to work? What would it be like to be on your third military deployment in two years? Leaders who make communities happier places are leaders who can empathize with people they are not and understand what would help.

In no small part because our legislators cannot understand what it would be like to go to work each week wondering if theirs will be the legislative body where the one congressperson will go berserk and begin shooting, or where some madman with an AR-15 will walk into the deliberative chambers to begin systematically shooting helpless, frightened congresspeople, they will not do a thing for our students and teachers. "Women and children first," is not a phrase heard on this ship of state.

A terribly conservative friend who loves Trump told me that what he likes best about him is that "Trump's a fighter." I guess one emphasis for leadership would be to find someone who fights, even though most of the people he fights with are fellow Americans. For me, I like the idea of empathetic leaders.

Using Charter Schools as Tools for Progress by Letting Them Patent New Approaches

Pedro Noguera writes a great piece in The Nation about charter schools titled, "Why Don't We Have Real Data on Charter Schools? Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque." 

He makes a variety of important points but one statistic he mentions almost in passing is to me the defining one: 

"According to a 2013 study by the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford University, only 29 percent of charter schools outperformed public schools with similar students in math, while 31 percent performed worse. Most charter schools, in fact, obtained results that were no better than traditional public schools."

Let's round this instead of using 29% or 31%. Essentially, what this Stanford study revealed is that 33% - one-third - of charter schools did better than public schools, one-third did worse and one-third did the same. Depending on just how you measure it, this exact same claim could be made of public schools themselves: about a third are noticeably better than average, about a third are worse and about a third are average - give or take. In other words, charters schools - on average - are no better and no different than public schools. 

Noguera reminds us that charter schools were supposed to be a way for specific schools to be free of traditional regulations in order to allow experimentation. What they have become instead is a means to compete with public schools without real transparency or accountability. 

I have an idea for making education more innovative, for giving incentive to every teacher and educational entrepreneur to make education better. Let organizations and individuals patent new ideas. Let them get a monopoly profit on the good idea of - say - using business startups in high school as a means to fund extracurricular activities for kids while teaching them about business, marketing, product development, using art for ads, math for balance sheets and profit and loss, etc. You might patent this as an organization ("The Wanna-be Jobs School of Business") or as an individual inside of  a public school. If other schools adopt your curriculum, they pay you. And for 7 years you might make millions on the spread of your idea. After that, your patent expires and every school anywhere can use the materials or approach for free. Education gets better and there is money available to incentive people to develop new materials, methods, and philosophies. 

As it now stands, there is no incentive for any charter school to share anything that would actually make other schools better. That would simply mean giving away their competitive advantage, which is nuts. Instead, give them incentive to develop approaches that would benefit everyone.

In the 1620s, Edward Coke (pronounced Cook) led the creation of patent law, essentially granting monopoly rights for a short-period before making knowledge of new technology public. This gave people incentive to invest time and money into inventions that previously only gentlemen of leisure might dabble with. By 1699, England had its first steam engine and during the next century the Industrial Revolution was underway. 

If the US is serious about promoting education, maybe the right model isn't letting private schools compete by using methods that appear to be - on average - no different from those of the average public school. Maybe the right model is letting any individual or organization patent educational approaches that every school would find enticing to adopt.

Association for Cognitive Dissociation

Michael Kaufman and I used to be on the board of the local Deming User Group. I've always liked the way he thinks. In his latest post, he comments about how attempts to change schools so often fail. He writes,

"I would contend the reason schools and schooling is the way it is - is because of the initial conditions that were present when the idea of free public schooling was conceived. In other words, the patterns established at the early stages of the development of the schooling system are the very same patterns that make it difficult, if not impossible, for schools and schooling to do the things on the list above [suggested changes and improvements]."

I wonder to what extent the problem is one of labeling. When we say schools, we all know what we mean - and we mean what we already have. By contrast, it would be fascinating to define a learning institution with a completely different name, like "Preparatory Institute for Great Happiness and Empowerment," or "Organization for Mind Altering Perceptions," or "A Place of Self Actualization and Occasional Humiliation."

If, by contrast, traditional schools were re-labeled as what they actually are, it might inspire everyone to gravitate away from them. For instance, "Room of Continual Tedium," or "The Institute for the Management of Mediocrity," might more accurately describe some traditional schools.

So, faithful readers (you two know who you are), what labels would encourage schools to transform? Ideas?

Transforming Education: Step Two

In conversation, my Sandi commented on my last post about education. Along with her education in education and child development, Sandi got certified in Montessori. She said that regardless of what is taught, we have to think about how it is taught. What is usually lacking is a context, or purpose, for what is taught

Montessori pre-schools are hugely popular. One of the many concepts underlying her teaching methods is the notion that children learn better if they start out manipulating things and then extract from these things (beads, say) the abstract notions of numbers.

Montessori high schools are rare. One of the key concepts behind her design of learning for teenagers is the notion that they need a context for what they are learning. She recommends, for example, that they actually run a business part time, extracting from that day to day operation more abstract notions of math, value, and translating ideas into action, into product. Lacking such a context, it is hard to engage students. Those who learn in traditional classes do so in spite of the design of education, not because of it. (Imagine a road designed in such a way that it was in spite of, and not because of, the design that cars avoided collisions.)

Russell Ackoff, one of my heroes, made this profoundly interesting point about our application of the analytic model to our world. If you analyze a problem, you break it down to its constituent parts and then work with those. The problem we analyzed about 500 years ago was the problem of life. We broke it into pieces - learning, work, and play all made separate. We have playgrounds and coliseums for play, schools for learning, and factories and offices for work. If you are in the classroom, you ought not to play and you are not going to work, to do anything productive (teenagers running a business as a way to learn?). If you are on the playground, you are not going to learn anything.

Ackoff is a systems thinking advocate and pioneer. For him the next wave of progress will come from adopting a worldview that looks at wholes and the relationships between parts instead of using analysis to break our world into parts seemingly easier to manage and solve. Instead of institutions that separate out our different selves, we should be designing institutions that accommodate our humanity. Why should we live our lives as tools of our tools or institutions? Why not make these tools adapt to us?

And taking such an approach may well have a more profound impact on the transformation of education than adopting or emphasizing any one new subject of study.

[And no, I am not turning R World into an education blog. But sometimes, thoughts just come in clumps, no?]

Transforming Education: Step One

In my most recent post, I mentioned in passing the possibility of defining education with vision instead of tradition. This seems deserving of elaboration, and I am nothing if not elaborate.

All education is prediction about the future. If you teach a child about spelling, you are predicting that he'll be writing and not live in a world of massively available voice recognition systems. If you teach a child dates about history, you assume that she'll be unable to quickly and easily look up those dates in on-line searches. If you spend time educating someone, you assume that they'll use their new knowledge in some useful way.

This assumes that you've given thought to the world in which a child will live once he's an adult. And yet next to no effort seems to go into developing a vision of the future context of lives. Children who are 10 now will reach their peak earning years about 2040 to 2050. It might be worth thinking about what will define that world and what skills will matter. We have, after all, about 12 to 20 years of formal education in which to educate them in preparation for this. Use properly, this ought to be plenty of time.

So, what skills are we confident will matter in 2050? As difficult as it seems to define that, I would imagine that communities could define fairly interesting and comprehensive lists of things that matter. I've touched on it before, but my own guess is that the list of things that will still matter in 2050 include:
Ability to stay engaged in tasks that matter
Problem solving
Creativity
Ability to stay engaged in relationships that matter
Communication
Emotional Intelligence
Ability to collaborate and coordinate with others
Management
Social Intelligence
Ability to find and define a sense of meaning, feeling like one's life matters
Having a sense of purpose
Managing one's finances
This merely a list that occurs to me, a rough draft. I would imagine that any community of interesting people would come up with a list different and more comprehensive. The point is, identifying the skills that will matter in 2050 ought to be the first step in defining the curriculum that matters today.

And speaking of communities, I have a community of readers that makes up, for me, the most interesting and thoughtful community I've experienced. What do you think will matter in 2050? What does that suggest we ought to be teaching? For bonus points, what is it that we're teaching today that is unlikely to matter in 2050? What should we eliminate from our curriculum?

Draw a Line

The kindergarten teacher had passed out a worksheet and told the class, "Draw a line between the turtle and the cow." Not only did the children seem to be taking a long time, some of them complained, "This is hard."

Hard? wondered the teacher. Why is this hard? Walking over to their desks she saw why. Most were laboriously drawing a "lion" between the turtle and the cow.

[True story from my wife's school this week.]

Confusion About Incentives & Management

You wouldn't think much of a doctor who dangled a $20 bill in front of a child with a fever and told him, "You can have this money if you'll just lower your temperature by 2 degrees." In fact, you'd know that you were dealing with a doctor who knew little about the body or medicine.

So what to make of the managers who dangle incentives in front of their people and then say, "You can have this money if you'll just increase profits by 10%." Or the school administrator who tells a principal or teacher, "You can have this money if you just increase average test scores by 10 points."

A management practitioner needs to understand system dynamics that ultimately define outcomes, just as a doctor needs to understand the physical processes that ultimately define states of health or disease.

Particularly in schools, this sensibility seems to be missing. The thought that vouchers, incentives, and ranking of schools will actually transform schools seems to me naïve, and resorting to incentives strikes me as an admission of defeat. If school administrators know what helps children to learn, they should institute this across all classrooms. If they don't know what to do, they should learn rather than admonish teachers.

If you need a clear example of how bankrupt is this approach, look at Iraq. Bush has basically been told by the American people to get things in order there. Unable to create order in Iraq, he's offered inducements to the generals. They, in turn, have ordered the Maliki government to create order. Maliki has, in turn, ordered those below him. And all the way down - from the American press and public to Bush to the Pentagon to Maliki - there is ignorance and inability. No one knows how to create order in Iraq and inducements are not going to make a difference. Not dips or rises in opinion polls, not additional troops or money (or fewer troops or money).

[The example of dangling money before a fevered child comes, if I remember correctly, from Alfie Kohn, whose delightful writing on competition and rewards will likely transform your opinion about such topics.]

Vouchers for Teachers

Advocates of vouchers define the education system as something that parents consume. In their minds, if parents were given vouchers that were equivalent to money and could "spend" these vouchers on the school they wanted their child to attend, schools would respond to demand for education like companies respond to market demand.

I'd argue that the parents are not the best decision-makers about how to shape schools: teachers are. In that light, perhaps we should set up a system in which teachers had the vouchers and could spend them as they wished. Imagine what it would be like.

Right now schools spend roughly $6,000 per student per year. Now, give that money to teachers. If they had, say, 20 students they'd get $120,000. But here's the catch. From that money, they'd have to lease or rent a building where they could teach, hire janitors for cleaning, hire administrators and assistants to help them, etc. Now, the entire administrative structure would be directed towards helping teachers to succeed. Rather than focus on pleasing the folks in Sacramento (or Little Rock or Albany), administrators would, of necessity, focus on helping teachers in the classroom. If the teacher(s) did not see any value in the school psychologist, teaching materials, or school principal, those entities would get no money. The ones that did help would receive money - perhaps even more than they do now.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I'm married to a teacher. The neighborhood she teaches in is lower income and she regularly brings home stories of her frustration with nonresponsive administrators or supposed helpers with teaching, cleaning, etc. It would be a very different matter if all these resources that were supposedly directed towards helping children learn were dependent on her for their funding. The level of responsiveness would have to go up.

One of the many advantages to this kind of system would be that you'd have the equivalent of about 6 million businesses (there are more than 6 million teachers in the US) all innovating and creating demand for high-value added resources and materials. What this would do to the level of innovation could be amazing.