Author: Alan Jones

Dr. Alan C. Jones

“Dad, I have to cancel our dinner date, I need to meet with my studio manager and architectural engineer”

by Alan Jones

      For the last few months, my wife and I have been trying to schedule a dinner date with my daughter. She is in the process of opening up her own Pilates Studio, whose demands seem to have her on call 24/7. Even when we reach her by phone, she keeps interrupting the conversation with an urgent call from one or more of the agents involved in opening up the studio. In these brief conversations, however, I have been surprised at how quickly and expertly she has mastered the details of finance, personnel, architectural design, constructional management, logistics of all kinds, and the intricacies of governmental rules and regulations.

      I should not have been surprised, she has always been a hard worker and very goal-oriented. Where my doubts might have arisen about her ability to open up and run a studio were her experiences with formal schooling. Although she was diligent in her studies and did fairly well in college, she always struggled with formal academic studies. In a recent family discussion of the gap between the abstractions of the academic world and the realities of acquiring building permits my son made the following comment: “You know Dad, what schools measure matters very little in the real world.”

      Both my wife and I, who spent our entire careers in teaching and administering in schools, were, to say the least, unable to mount a modest response to my son’s insight. Our failure to author a persuasive response to my son’s claim was our personal experiences in schooling where the various talents and abilities we developed in our various school positions were never measured in a formal academic setting. In that same conversation, I recounted the comment by my high school algebra teacher who repeatedly told the class that if we didn’t do well in Algebra our career choices were doomed. Of course, in the real world of teaching and school administration, where I was fairly successful, I never used algebra again.

      As I recounted my experiences in the classroom and school offices, there were numerous talents and skills—team building, communication, critical thinking, perspective taking, self-control, planning, and social-emotional awareness– I employed that were never taught or measured in schools. This brings me to the theme of this blog which will be a summary of the ideas that David Brooks wrote about in a recent Atlantic journal piece.

      Brook argues that the definition of merit in this country was established by a committee formed in 1892 by James, Conant, President of Harvard University, to standardize the high school curriculum. The committee began the project in response to two problems with the current system of college admissions. The first problem was high school transcripts filled with course offerings that defied any form of quantitative analysis. The second problem was a college admission process that looked passed student grades and instead looked at their parent’s bankbook. Conant believed that American Democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.”

      The fix that Conant’s Committee of Ten presented to high schools throughout the nation was a college admissions process that prized academic achievement over any other human trait. Academic achievement in this redesign of college admissions was based on grades in a series of prescribed academic subjects and scores on standardized tests. The committee’s report assumed that intelligence—again measured by grades and test scores—was the highest human trait. College admissions offices would become the primary players in the sorting system segregating the smart from the not-so-smart. The other assumption Conant made was intelligence was randomly distributed and thus would achieve a broad mix of student backgrounds sitting in college classrooms. This later assumption proved false when parents, parents with money, orchestrated a set of skill-building processes—from college coaches to SAT/ACT preparation programs—to sort their son or daughter into the premiere university programs.

      This brings me to David Brook’s sins of meritocracy, which are now trapping schools and households into a giant sorting system:

Sin #1: The system overrates intelligence: As in the case of my daughter, the many skills my daughter is employing to open up and manage a Pilates Studio are not measured on standardized tests or are revealed in grades in academic subjects. Relying on some quantitative measure of school performance, in the words of David Brooks misses, “70% of what we want to know about a person.” Intelligence, in other words, is not the same as effectiveness.

Sin #2: Success in schools is the same as success in life.  As a lifelong educator, I can testify to the fact that success in schools is entirely dependent on the ability to jump through hoops that adults put up. In the words of David Brooks: “grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant, but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership, ability, creativity, or courage.”

Sin #3: The game is rigged: A true meritocracy would sort people by innate ability, but what the college admissions process has become is sorting students by how wealthy their parents are. Well-off parents are investing massive amounts of money in all manner of college preparation programs to make certain their children are admitted to an Ivy League school.

Sin #4: We have created an American caste system: We now have in this nation a deep divide between those who are well-educated and those who are less well-educated. Those less well education suffer from a variety of ills: divorce, drug addiction, and obesity. The cognitive elite withdraws to gated communities with six-figure incomes and a range of privatized services that cater to health and well-being.

      All of these sins of meritocracy have not only failed at Conant’s goal of creating a natural aristocracy of talent but created a host of blowbacks that have led us into several foreign quagmires, shattered our trusts in institutions, funneled talented elites’ jobs in finance or consulting; and, presently, provoked a populist backlash that has divided our nation into red states and blue states.

      Brooks ends his article with a call to “humanize meritocracy.” The concept, in and of itself, is a worthwhile goal. We live in a society, whose complexities, demand smart people. The big change must become how we define merit. The qualities so admired by Conant—quantification, objectification, optimization, and efficiency—need to be replaced with non-cognitive skills that are harder to quantify: emotional flexibility, grit, social agility, curiosity, sense of drive, and mission, agility, and social intelligence. Few schools in this nation possess the organizational structure and instructional methodologies that would accommodate and advance this new definition of merit. I have written numerous blogs on what these kinds of schools would look like. For the most part, however, our schools will continue to mirror the goals and processes developed by Conant. Placing humans on a single scale—the bell-shaped curve—is easy. The difficult question school administrators should be asking themselves, one which is often professed in school mission statements is: “What is each student great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?

“Dad, there are no bad decisions”

by Alan Jones

(Daughter to Father)

The idea for this blog originated with a conversation I had with my daughter regarding a new business venture she was orchestrating. Both my wife and I had managerial backgrounds, so, we were questioning her recent business moves—a lot of “what if” statements. She patiently responded to all of these queries with what was in my mind sound business and organizational logic. At some point in the questioning process, I sensed my daughter was becoming somewhat frustrated with the barrage of “what if” questions. In the middle of one of my “what if” questions she made the comment that introduces this blog: “Dad there are no bad decisions. People keep looking for certainty, for safety, for decisions that are not bad. But, you don’t grow in a job, in life, in anything you do without learning from bad decisions. You have to find out what works for you.”

     As I thought about my daughter’s comment, I reflected on the countless decisions I had made in my job and personal life. They all fall on a continuum from the highly rational to the highly emotional. As an individual prone to a rational decision-making model, I focused on the decision-making process: identify the problem>gather information>evaluate alternative solutions> and select the option with the highest utility. I discussed my thoughts with my wife who said to me: “Al, you missed the point of what our daughter said.” She went on to explain that it is not the process for making a decision that should be examined, but rather the process you use when it turns out to be a bad decision.

      What struck me with this response is the feedback function, which is what my daughter was focusing on, and the most important function in the act of learning, is exactly the function schools pay little attention to. Yes, schools do provide feedback, in fact, mountains of feedback, but, it is in the form of red pen notations or perfunctory recitation of correct answers on a forced choice testing instrument. There is little attention paid to the “why” of a wrong answer, or a process for checking for wrong answers, or for considering how some wrong answers but be corrected in different circumstances. The source of these poorly designed feedback functions is in assessment instruments that are not designed to analyze decisions, but, to identify wrong answers. After school, however, in the real occupational world, bosses are not looking for the right answers, but rather the effective enactment of goals, policies, and plans.

      The source of the effective enactment of goals, policies, and plans is a repertoire of leadership and managerial moves that are built around bad decisions or the often-repeated organizational axiom: “I won’t do that again.” This short axiom illustrates workers in the trades and professions engaging in a feedback function that has examined the causes and effects of a process that resulted in bad outcomes. Most importantly, within that process, the worker has determined what he or she ought to have done. Those of us in leadership or managerial roles have our private thought process for analyzing bad decisions—mine in particular was the “five whys tool” which for me always led to the root cause of the bad decision.

      Returning to my daughter’s comment, over time the knowledge base developed over the analysis of bad decisions, produces sound professional judgment and what works for you—there are no bad decisions.

“My Two Occupational Worlds”

by Alan Jones

Growing up in my household I was apprenticed into the world of trades. My Dad was an electrician. He loved his occupation. He told me that one of the trades was in my future. To whet my appetite for an occupation in the trades I became his apprentice on weekends where he earned extra money working side jobs. Under his tutelage, I learned the rudiments of the basic trades—plumbing, carpentry, electricity. Although my Dad was a great teacher, and extremely patient with an individual whose use of hand tools was always problematic, I found these jobs boring and poorly aligned with my hand/eye coordination. My hidden distaste for the trades became public when I applied for college in my senior year in high school.

In the years I attended college, I studied during the day and worked at several blue-collar jobs at night and during the summer. My rudimentary background in the trades proved helpful in these part-time jobs. After college, I went into careers in teaching and school administration. What follows are lessons I took away from my journey between the occupational worlds of the trades and the professions.

Lesson 1: Abstractions, Abstractions, Abstractions:

In classrooms, you are drawn into a world of abstractions that have little or no relationship to the problems I encountered on the factory floor. This does not mean on the factory floor there were no abstractions, but the abstractions relate directly to the use of tools that produce tangible outcomes. In the classroom, the abstract tools you acquire are applied to other abstractions, which, often produce unclear outcomes.

Lesson 2: Well-defined skills:

In the trades, there are well-defined skills that can be observed and rated for performance. In the classroom, the grades you receive tell us little about how well the abstractions you have learned will be applied in real-world situations.

Lesson 3: Depersonalization

In the professional world, you are subjected to a policy and protocol world that fits a particular role. That role may or may not fit the realities of the world the professional works in. In the trades, however, you come face-to-face with the realities of your job, with clear functions to be performed and clear standards of performance.

Lesson 4: My Bad

Working on the shop floor mistakes are up close and personal. Although the mistakes are recognizable by fellow workers, they also recognize and expect that the mistake will be corrected. In the professions, you are working with many unknown variables that are interacting in unpredictable ways. The uncertainties built into professional tasks make it difficult to determine blame for a bad outcome or how to remediate a bad outcome. Often these bad outcomes are blamed on the implementation process—unproven theories, poorly designed plans, lack of resources—which result in no professional assuming direct responsibility for the bad outcome, and, a feeling amongst decision makers that they are infallible.

Lesson 5: Loss of Agency

 The concept of agency is activities directed to outcomes that the worker has determined to be worthwhile and under their full control to determine the worthwhile outcome. In the world of professions, the concept of agency becomes marginalized with functions and tasks that are of questionable value and in which the professional has little control over outcomes. Simply put, the agency comes down to who determines the ends. On the shop floor, ultimately the worker will have direct control over outcomes. In the office, outcomes are dictated by individuals lodged on the office floors above them.

Lesson 6: Coherent Principles of Practice

 Each of my part-time jobs in assorted trade-like occupations possessed a set of specific skills and routines that resulted in concrete outcomes. Although the type of tasks I was assigned were rudimentary, the tradesman I worked with demonstrated the depth and breadth of the principles that guided their craft. In the professions, I was confronted with goals, functions, and tasks that were often abstractions from the roles I was asked to perform. So much of what I performed in school was founded on theories and practices that were incoherent, uncertain, and difficult to quantify. In actual practice, we based much of what we did on our own experience and attempted to make collective sense out of the research in our field, which, each article ending with the section termed, “limitations of the study.”

 What I have attempted to describe in this blog are the differing goals, values, and practices between the trades and the professions. These descriptions, however, were formulated by what I would term the golden age of labor—where clear distinctions could be made between manual and white-collar work. In the last decade, however, both manual and white-collar work have been drained of their cognitive elements. The shop floor is now dominated by robots and the office floor is dominated by AI. The global economy is working at turning all occupations into assembly line work. The loss of status in both occupations field is having terrible social and political consequences.

The House of Cards of School Reform Failure

by Alan Jones

In my four decades working in different positions in schools I have experienced several national and state school reform initiatives designed to improve student achievement. As a participant in these waves of school reform, what I observed firsthand mirrors the findings of several research studies of the two most recent national reform initiatives: the standards movement of the 1980s and the accountability-based reform of the 2000s. The research concluded the following:

  • The rise in student achievement was meager.
  • Teachers adopted surface-level features of the reform initiative (materials, student group arrangements), but did not make fundamental changes in how they taught.
  • Overall the changes in instructional practice were piecemeal and superficial.
  • School leaders, for the most part, were satisfied with these same superficial changes.

      My involvement in both small and large efforts to change teaching practices all ended with the same dismal outcomes documented in the research. At times, those of us in school offices played the standard managerial blame game—poor parenting, recalcitrant teachers, lack of resources—to explain, what became for me, the grammar of school reform failure. From my perspective, I assumed that our administrative team had drawn up the perfect plan to fully implement the goals and practices of the reform initiative. The failure of these reform initiatives to take hold in the classroom must be due to forces outside the control of my colleagues and myself.

      Later in my career, when I was consulting with school districts struggling to implement a reform initiative, I was able to assume a third-party person’s objective view of the implementation process. At first, I noted some missing components to the plan: poorly designed staff development; lack of a defined curriculum process; confusion over the goals and practices of the reform initiative. I noted these particular shortcomings, but, these deficiencies were just that—particular shortcomings.

      What pulled these particular shortcomings together was a private sector framework developed by James Clear. He titled the framework: The 3 Stages of Failure.” Below is a brief summary of each stage of failure:

Stage 1 is a Failure of Tactics (HOW Mistakes): Failure to fully develop systems supporting the initiative or failure to pay attention to the details of implementation. You had a good plan and a clear vision, but, as the saying goes: “the devil is in the details.”

Stage 2 is a Failure of Strategy (WHAT Mistakes): The agreed-upon strategy fails to deliver the results expected, your team is clear about why you adopted the initiative and how to implement the initiative, but chose the wrong WHAT to make it happen.

Stage 3 is a Failure of Vision (WHY Mistakes): Your organization does not set a clear direction for yourself, a direction that is not meaningful to you or fails to provide an understanding of why you do things you do.

      Clear’s framework brought to light the fundamental shortcomings of main office plans for implementing a new organization or instructional change. During the summer, when these plans are developed, school administrators follow the tired and true managerial components of running a school well. In their careers, school administrators become adept at aligning the certainties of management—budgets, personnel, timelines, logistics, workflows, and scheduling—with institutional goals—efficiency, stability, standardization, and accountability. Where all three stages of failure creep into main offices are initiatives that ask school administrators to implement initiatives that require working with the uncertainties of teacher backgrounds and dispositions; the uncertainties of theory-based pedagogies; the uncertainties of goals; and the uncertainties of administrative commitment.

      In the summary below, I will place the shortfalls in the implementation of the district I worked with into Clear’s three stages of failure framework:

      Stage 1:   Failure of Tactics: The instructional systems required to support the reform initiatives required to support the initiative —professional development, curriculum materials, expertise, release time, space, scheduling—were nonexistent, poorly resourced, or unevenly delivered.

      Stage 2:   Failure of Strategy: The managerial norms for rolling out a new instructional initiative—announcement, distribution of materials, scheduled workshops, documentation of benchmarks, assessment schedules, and instruments—were poorly aligned with the depth and breadth of training and organizational changes required to implement the substance of the reform initiatives.

      Stage 3:   Failure of Vision: The reform initiatives were poorly aligned with mission-driven goals and values and were often in conflict with the goals and values of recently adopted initiatives.

      The other realization I took away from Clear’s framework was the implementation of the goals, values, and practices of new approaches to teaching and learning required a commitment from administrative offices that all THREE stages of implementation—tactics, strategy, and vision—be in perfect alignment. In looking back on my efforts at fully implementing new approaches to teaching and learning, I had to honestly admit to myself, that one or more of these stages was not fully developed or fully aligned with the other stages. The time and resource pressures from outside governing agencies and central offices to implement a mandated change initiative too often result in cutting corners or one more of Clear’s stages, Like a house of cards, pulling one of Clear’s cards (stages) out of the implementation deck, results in the collapse of the goals, values, and practices of a school reform initiative.

“Coding is the future: Or, is it?”

by Alan Jones

      Several years ago, I was at a graduation dinner for a relative’s son. Similar to the scenes in the movie The Graduate, several attendees were giving the new graduate advice on future career fields that were both lucrative and secure. Top among the suggestions was the field of “coding.” Simply put, a coder is a professional who builds programs for websites and apps. Based on what I was reading in the media, it appeared to me that this was sound advice.

      Recently, however, the media has offered a different read on that piece of advice. Three of the major tech companies—Google, Cisco, Microsoft—have laid off thousands of tech workers. All of these tech workers were in the six-figure income bracket. The companies involved have blamed slowing demand, supply chain constraints, cost-saving measures, and changing technologies as the source for the layoffs.

      I watched several YouTube videos featuring laid-off workers expressing their feelings about being laid off. In these conversations, I could not help but be impressed with their educational backgrounds—all attended top computer engineering universities— and their work experiences—all were loyal, made significant contributions to the company, and had advanced to top management positions.

      What made these confessions foreign to me was the career path I had experienced. My career background amounted to years of training in one profession, entering that profession, and then retiring forty years later. For the most part, the profession changed little from when I entered it. What I read in the media and listened to on the YouTube videos is a job market now dominated by uncertainty. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person will change careers 5-7 times during their working life. Approximately 30% of the total workforce will now change jobs every 12 months. All of these changes require significant retraining.

      As a retired educator—teacher, principal, professor—these job market findings call into question the following axioms we educators have preached from auditorium stages and classroom lectures.

      Axiom #1:   The more education, the better the job.

      Axiom #2:   This subject is a gateway to a good-paying job.

      Axiom #3:   What we measure in schools aligns with real-world knowledge and skills.

      Axiom #4:   A school platform—rules, courses, credits, bells—aligns well with real-world working conditions and expectations.

      Based on recent job market findings, the axioms we preach are woefully out of step with real-world occupational realities. The static nature of our current schooling model is opposed to developing employees who are adaptive learners who can navigate ever-changing personal, academic, social, and economic environments.

      All school mission statements speak to these real-world realities but, in practice, revert to institutional goals of schooling that value telling overdoing, uniformity over novelty, accountability over responsibility, efficiency over effectiveness, control over autonomy, and competitiveness over mastery. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a group of progressive educators who promoted a school design and pedagogy more attuned to twenty-first-century occupational demands.  administrative “progressives” in urban school systems adopted a school model that was cost-efficient and accountable—the same model that our sons and daughters now attend.

      If schools are serious about preparing our sons and daughters for real world occupations, they must abandon instructional platforms installed at turn of twentieth century and experiment with pedagogical models more attuned to working in a Google world. School districts that decide to part ways with an antiquated model of schooling should question how talent is treated in classrooms. Presently, talent in our nation’s classrooms is a one size fits all definition: scoring high grades in academic subjects and standardized tests. In a Google world, however, talent is broadly defined as a quality with the following attributes.

  • Different talents complement each other;
  • Any large-scale projects demand multitude of talents;
  • Different talents bring different and often fresh perspectives (major inventions in our century were developed by individuals at the margins of our society);
  • Diversity prepares societies for change.

With this expanded definition of talent in place, schools would need to rethink and reconstruct the entire test-driven subject centered curriculum. I have written a number of blogs on what that restructured curriculum would look like. Suffice it to say the “assign and assess” curriculum would be replaced with a “question and experiment” curriculum housed in a variety of learning environments that provide students with different experiences and opportunities to learn.