Tag: education

Democracy and Education

by Alan Jones

 “The process and the goal of education are the same thing.”

(John Dewey)

“The core duty of tax-supported public schools in a democracy is to pass on to the next generation democratic attitudes, values, and behaviors.”

(Larry Cuban)

      At the turn of the century, there was a group of progressive educators who believed that our schools should bring democracy to life in the curriculum, in school governance, in community relations, and in the hearts and minds of young people. The various curriculum designs developed around this core belief would balance creative individuality with concern for the welfare of others and a desire for the common good. These designs would focus on personally and socially significant themes, collaboratively planned by teachers and students in democratic learning communities.

      As I have written about in previous blogs, today the talk of teaching and learning is mostly about something else entirely. The long list of facts and skills lodged in thick textbooks mistakenly calls this a curriculum, and the definition of curriculum planning itself is reduced to the managerial function of aligning standards, tests, lesson plans, and all the rest of institutional mechanisms needed to control young people and teachers. School administrators respond to the boredom of these institutionalized curriculum designs with fads and glitzy programs with no pedagogical or moral compass to guide us.

      What would that moral compass look like? The best description of a democratic compass can be found in John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916), where he envisions moral direction not in fixed institutional rules and standards, but as the ability to think reflectively, act cooperatively, and judge one’s actions in light of their consequences for the community. What follows are the major themes that organize Dewey’s argument.

      Education as Growth

      Dewey rejects the primary goal of schooling written into school missions’ statements: education as a preparation for future life. Instead, Dewey views growth as the primary goal of schooling, which he defines as A continuous process of developing capacities for intelligent action. Classrooms, in Dewey’s mind, should nurture adaptability and curiosity, not conformity.

      Democracy as a Mode of Associated Living

        Dewey defines democracy as not merely a description of political structures, duties of citizenship, and patriotic instruction, but as a way of life characterized by communication, participation, and shared experience. That way of life is best represented in school organizations, curricula, and activity structures that connect learners to the life of the community and engage them in genuine or simulated forms of political participation.

        Experience and Reflection

        Teaching and learning must be grounded in experience—in active engagement with real-world tasks and problems. Rather than classrooms ruled by teacher talk and the transmission of inert information, students would enter inquiry-based environments where meaning emerges through the interplay of doing and thinking.

        Role of the Teacher

        In classrooms where students are actively engaged in real-world tasks and problems, teachers relinquish the role of knowledge transmitters and assume the role of facilitators who design learning experiences that foster growth.

        The Unity of Theory and Practice

        Dewey’s pragmatism is grounded in processes where thought and action are inseparable. Knowledge is abstract contemplation or memorization of facts and processes, but the outcome of a problem-solving activity. Learning must connect theory and practice—ideas tested by consequences.

        Individuality and Social Responsibility

        While individual development of children and adolescents is a fundamental value expressed in school mission statements, Dewey insists that individuality flourishes only within a social context. Education, for Dewey, should cultivate both personal autonomy and social responsibility—to act intelligently for the good of the community.

        The Problem with Institutional Schooling

        A recurring theme in Dewey’s writings on education is the tendency of traditional schooling to be authoritarian, static, and subject-centered. Too much of institutional schooling treats students as passive recipients rather than active participants in their own learning. A Deweyan school would emphasize inquiry, cooperation, and the integration of subjects around meaningful problems.

        Redesign of Knowledge and Curriculum

        If school administrators are serious about teaching democratic values, they must commit to moving away from fixed subjects and fixed disciplinary boundaries toward a curriculum that employs academic tools to address real-world problems. Curriculum, then, must be dynamic and connected to students’ lived experiences.

        Education as the Foundation of Democracy

        Progressive educators at the turn of the century believed that the survival of democracy depended on educational renewal. A democratic society requires citizens who possess the following attitudes, values, and behaviors:

  • Open-mindedness to different opinions and a willingness to listen to such opinions.
  • Treating individuals decently and fairly, regardless of their backgrounds.
  • A commitment to talk through problems, reason deliberately, and struggle to openly arrive at a compromise.

“The Reflective Practitioner: Part 3- WHY there is no WHY in Main Offices”

by Alan Jones

Donald Schön’s book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, elaborates on what is the professional norm for implementing policies, procedures, initiatives, or solving difficult organizational problems. The first part of that norm—“reflection in action” is a mainstay of all main offices. The second part of that norm—“reflection on action” is largely ignored in those same main offices. If a reflection on an action question randomly appears in a main office or around a conference table, the response from the administrator sitting at the front of the table would go something like this: “Interesting point, Peter. We are under a time crutch, so let’s move on to the next item on the agenda.” If you were to further question administrators on why they ignore WHY questions, they would offer the following rationale for moving on to the next item on the agenda:

            The WHY has already been decided upon

            School administrators at the middle management level have been trained to implement. The assumption when a policy, a procedure, or an initiative, lands in an inbox, is the WHY has already been determined at offices and governing bodies.

             Time

            All new policies, procedures, and initiatives, land in an inbox with a time frame that typically starts with the beginning of the new school year. That time framework leaves little room for asking WHY questions, and, perhaps, answers that would require lengthy discussions and revisions to the initiative.

            Schools are institutions

            Although all school mission statements pursue aspirational goals—agency, interests, relationships, novelty, diversity—the organization of schools pursues institutional goals—efficient, predictable, quantifiable, and accountable. A deep dive into WHY questions will end up with aspirational answers, which will call into question the institutional substance of most school-wide policies, procedures, and initiatives.

            Lack of vocabularies

            Main offices are dominated by institutional vocabularies—budgets, procedures, logistics, timelines, regulations—with little or no academic vocabulary present in the main offices—theories, concepts, and ideas. Even if an academic term were to be uttered in the main office, the managerial mindset of school administrators would be unable to connect a theory, a concept, or an idea, to the goals and plans of an institutional policy, procedure, or initiative.

            Career Paths

            The course structure for certification in school administration and the career paths for aspirating school administrators’ value “getting stuff done.” Early on in the career of a school administrator, he or she learns that padding your resume with institutional accomplishments—balancing budgets, passing referendums, completing building projects, implementing technology plans—are fast tacks to school and district leadership roles. Not so much for resumes filled with teaching and learning accomplishments—curriculum rewrites, designing teacher training workshops, implementing new pedagogical programs, supervising classroom instruction.

            An Impatience with Ivory Tower Talk

            Although all school administrators have a background in an academic specialty and have earned multiple university certifications in school administration, when administrators graduate from universities they quickly abandon the goals and values of the academic mind for the institutional goals and values of the managerial mind. This abandonment is on display in a look of impatience or sometimes sarcasm from fellow administrators who detect a conversation or meeting is taking an academic turn. Always, in the background of these conversations and meetings, is getting stuff done—not questioning what stuff should be done.

“The 10-80-10 Rule”

by Alan Jones

      In one of his appearances, the late Steve Jobs described what he termed, the “10-80-10” rule of leadership. The rule is a leadership principle that prescribes where effective leaders should spend their time:

  • 10% of the time should be spent communicating your vision for “the thing.”
  • 80% of the time should be spent moving the “the thing” forward.
  • 10% of the time polishing the thin, and helping others to understand why and how you are tweaking “the thing.”

      “THE THING” in this leadership principle is any product or outcome the organization is set up to create. Applied to schools “the thing” or “things,” are listed in school mission statements. Popular things listed in these documents are as follows:

  • “Well prepared for college and a career path”
  • “Life-long learner”
  • “Productive global citizen”
  • “Learn to think critically and deeply”
  • “Develop diverse skills, talents, interests, and abilities”
  • “Nurture each child’s curiosity”

      The obstacle that school leaders run into when trying to emulate the 10-80-10 rule is school offices that fail to address the first 10% rule: “10% of the time should be spent communicating a vision of schooling.” Yes, most schools do write a mission statement; and, yes, the mission statements are a mixture of many worthwhile educational goals. The schools I led, however, were designed around two conflicting purposes for schooling. The first reason, which was articulated in school mission statements, was to create critical thinkers or to put it another way, thinkers that would distance themselves from conventional wisdom.

      The second reason, the reason that schools were designed to implement, and which school communities supported with their tax dollars, was the goal of socialization: accept the world as, with all of its rules, requirements, and constraints. The school facility, along with the organization of curriculum and instruction, established a schooling regime, founded on standardization, conformity, regulation, credentialing, accreditation, and accounting.  There was little space in our school where mission-driven goals—love of learning, democratic participation, asking challenging questions—were valued or promoted.

      Numerous surveys of student attitudes towards schooling have reported student discontent with a school organization and curriculum that values a grammar of schooling grounded in memorization, recitation, and quantitative measures of what has been memorized and recited on a test. Each of these values establishes an instructional regime that endorses the following principles of teaching and learning:

  • All knowledge is fixed and resides in a textbook
  • Teachers are truth-tellers
  • Practice makes perfect
  • Points are deducted for incorrect answers
  • Facts first/meaning later
  • Timed tests indicate speed and learning
  • Abstractions describe reality

      I could on, but, will stop here to point out that each of these principles, and many more I could list, have no basis in the research, and, create learning environments that are antithetical to engaging the minds of children and adolescents. I will not go into detailed refutations of the reach learning principle. Suffice it to say that an instructional regime founded on fixed knowledge, accumulation of facts, repetition, correctness, and replication, not only distorts the educational values written into school mission statements but turns the remaining elements of Jobs rule of leadership into a problem of engineering rather than enacting.

      The distinction between both processes—engineering and enacting—is how school administrators respond to student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling. Typical indicators of student dissatisfaction with the grammar of schooling are low test scores, poor attendance, high drop-out rates, and high disciplinary violations. When questioned on these quantitative indicators of low student engagement, school administrators offer an engineering fix: lower class size, hire more support staff, lengthen periods, adopt a program, and drop electives. Rarely in these conversations do administrators return to Jobs first 10%—their vision of schooling, and whether that vision— mission-driven values and goals—is being realized in classrooms that surround their school offices. Instead, they proceed to tinker with an engineering solution—the other 80%/10%—with little or no effect on schools that for most students (74% in a recent survey) feel like a prison.

      Schools intent on living up to their school’s mission statement must return to Jobs first 10%—the purpose of schooling or more broadly what it means to be educated. Presently, the purpose of schooling has been reduced to institutional goals: replicate on a test what a teacher tells a class or what is assigned in a textbook. The alternative model of schooling, one which John Dewey and a group of progressive educators pursued at the turn of the century classrooms where students are asked: to see relationships; reexamine practices, habits, assumptions, and biases; to decide how to live their life; to challenge the final vocabularies of their parents.

      Dewey’s model of schooling or what it means to be educated, would require a complete redesign of the structure of schooling and teaching methodologies to restore agency to student learning. I will not go into the particulars of what these classrooms would look like—well, in fact, there would be no classrooms per se—but the remaining Jobs 80%/10% rule would be devoted to moving the “thing” forward, the thing being learning environments that encourage students to think about what they know, what they care about, and what they want to know more about.

“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.