I recently had a conversation with the teacher who read my blog post on high school math. I was told that I’d missed the most important aspect regarding students learning math in high school. The most important aspect, I was told, is that students need to learn algebra and other higher math because it trains them, and their minds, in a certain way of thinking and performing.

I’ve heard this argument many times, and in fact read an article some time ago that compared it to athletes lifting weights. The article argued that very few athletes participate in competitive weightlifting, yet they all lift weights to prepare for their particular competition.

That made some sense to me but I don’t think they took the analogy far enough. I believe that cognitive strength and conditioning is necessary for our students. I just don’t believe that the courses we have traditionally taught in schools are the only way to achieve cognitive strength and conditioning.

I think that that defense is a rationalization to support continuing what we’ve always done. I would agree that algebra and other higher math courses are appropriate for some kids, but as in athletics, the method of strength and conditioning used by an individual depends on their ultimate goal.

Not all athletes lift weights and condition in the same way. In fact, athletes in the same sport approach strength and conditioning differently. I think we should have that same flexibility in our schools.

Every time I talk to teachers and other educators about school change they agree that schools need to change. However, whenever we start to get to the details we can never reach agreement what should be changed. No matter what area of the current educational system I bring up there’s a rationale for keeping it as it is.

The cognitive strength and conditioning argument is just another rationalization to avoid real school change. – Steve Wyckoff

I speak to groups often about school change and I frequently hear the same question, “Don’t you think were doing anything right?” The answer is “yes” with a great big BUT. That “BUT” is this.

We are doing the best job in education that we have ever done, at what we’ve always done. The problem is this, what we’ve always done is not the right thing to be doing in the 21st century.

The problem is school change happens so slowly, or not at all, that over the years, and now even decades, we have fallen further and further behind. Most of you are too young to remember this chronology but in the 60s we saw major shift when we included special education students in regular education classrooms.

Between that time and 1983 we saw a very gradual gap develop between what we were doing in schools and what we needed to be doing with our students to prepare them for their future. In 1983 the report, A Nation At Risk, was the first shot across the bow of public education.

Between 1983 and the late 1980s we saw an increase in the criticism of public education that led to a highly contentious conversation about “outcome based education.” That was a really the beginning of the conversation fueled by our students’ inability to adequately perform in society.

Between the late 80s and the early 1990s we saw states all across the country mandating accreditation processes based on outcomes rather than inputs. Kansas was no different. The Outcome Accreditation Task force was charged with creating the structure for a new accreditation process that would become known as QPA, Quality Performance Accreditation. In the interest of full disclosure I was part of that task force.

Following the implementation of accreditation processes focusing on outcomes across the nation, there was a mass movement to understand and identify standards, align curriculum, and base accountability on state level standardized assessments. The crowning jewel of that movement is No Child Left Behind.

And now in Kansas we have the Kansas Education Commission trying to figure out what the next iteration of  NCLB will look like. Again, in the interest of full disclosure I am part of the Kansas Education Commission.

I can tell you what it shouldn’t look like. It shouldn’t look like schools have looked for over 100 years. The problem is this. We have spent the last 25 years seriously trying to improve public education by getting better at what we’ve always done. Somewhere along the line we should have started the conversation about what we should be doing instead of what we’ve always done.

So when somebody asks, “Are we doing anything right?” It depends on your perspective. If you’re asking, “Are we getting the things right that we’re working on?” The answer is “yes” we’re doing a tremendous job. If you’re asking, “Are all the things were working on the right things to be working on in order to prepare our kids for the 21st century?” the answer is “absolutely not.”

It’s not too late, but we need to get moving. School change doesn’t just mean that we change how we do what we’ve always done, it means to change what we’re doing.-  Steve Wyckoff

Friday I had the distinct pleasure of listening to a panel discussion by educators from Erie Kansas about real school change. Mike Carson, Ted Hill, Rose Frye, and Steve Oliver engaged in a wonderful webcast that lasted over an hour and a half, talking about project-based learning. The most encouraging thing about the webcast was that it dealt with education, and a better way of organizing and running schools to better meet the needs of the students, even though the discussion was prompted by declining resources and the need to dramatically cut costs in schools.

So why the title over under? Well, an over-under or over/under bet is a wager in which a sports book will predict a number for a statistic in a given game usually the combined score of the two teams. I wonder what the over under is for the total number of schools that will change to a project-based curriculum even though it is more effective, and more efficient in educating our children.

I think it will take three major skills on the part of superintendents to pull off what Erie high school has pulled off.
1. It will require great courage on the part of the superintendent to lead this change.  It is a political hot potato to change what we’ve always done in schools regardless of how dismal the current results are.
2. It will require great vision on the part of school leaders. We have been doing what we do in schools for so long that it is almost part of an educator’s DNA. Having a vision, and having the ability to share the vision will be critical.
3. It will required great leadership skill. Making this kind of change will take skills that are rarely called upon to run an existing school district.

So what do I think the over and under will be? One. I just don’t see evidence of leaders who have the combination of courage, vision, and leadership to pull it off. I hope I’m wrong. I truly believe that this could be a tremendous solution to a tremendous problem. Only time will tell if we can make the real school change necessary. –  Steve Wyckoff

Most people really don’t like change, even though there are those among us who love it. In schools the dislike for change is profound. I think that educators are so resistant to change because we simply rarely change. Anything. Ever. Oh, we see the individual teacher who changes instructional techniques, but if you took somebody who hadn’t been in a school since the 60s and walked them into a high school today, there is nothing about the school that they wouldn’t feel comfortable with.

We do however, see some dramatic systemic change occasionally. And in other instances we see superintendents try to implement real systemic change but abandoned their efforts because of the resistance. So who is most resistant to this change?

I’ve written before (part 1 & part 2) in this space about the “Innovators Dilemma“, a book written by Clayton Christiansen. He describes how disruptive technologies force change. But what I’d like to talk about here is where does the greatest resistance come from when trying to change schools. In other words, who is the change toughest on?

The group that might be the most resistant to change are the parents of the students who are the most successful. Typically these parents themselves were successful in school, and their kids are being very successful in school, and the last thing they want is to change the system that might drop them down the status ladder.

Not surprisingly, the students who are the most successful are also highly resistant to change. Why would they want to stop doing what really works well for them in exchange for something that might work really well for other kids? Several years ago I had an interesting conversation with a young lady who was extremely successful in school. We had done an exercise with a group of students who are all leaders in their schools. They did a great job of identifying the kind of educational experience were the most learning occurred. But she, speaking for the rest of the group, pointed out that that’s not the kind of learning environment she wanted. In the current system she was receiving A’s and the teacher was doing all the work. Why would she want to change?

Another group who are highly resistance to change are young teachers. When I first realized this it was a shock to me. I assumed that young teachers would be much more open to change. After all, we hear all the time how the young are willing to change and the old are set in their ways. It turned out that most young teachers have dreamed of being the teacher in that class that they loved when they were in school. They fantasized about themselves standing in front of the room pontificating to starry eyed students. The last thing they want to do is sabotage their own dream.

The school’s Board of Education usually starts out supporting change but realizes quickly that any patron who attended school knows exactly what a school should look like. And every patron attended school. For some reason we wouldn’t tolerate other aspects of our life not changing. We wouldn’t dream of seeking medical care that was 50 years out of date. Or driving a car like a 63 Chevy. But when it comes to changing schools EVERYBODY knows what school should look like. And they all have a phone, and they all will call a board member.

You may have noticed the absence of veteran teachers from my list. Surprisingly I have a lot of conversations with veteran teachers that know something is wrong. They know our kids are disengaged, that what our kids are learning is irrelevant, and that we aren’t doing a great job of preparing kids for the 21st century. There is very little consensus about what to do, but understanding that something needs to be done is very common.

Last but not least however our high school principals. I have deep empathy for this group. They, along with their assistants, have the toughest job in education. Keeping an obsolete system under control and functioning is more than a full-time job. The thought of changing it at the same time they’re running it is beyond comprehension for most of them. -  Steve Wyckoff

I have just begun to read Howard Gardner’s new book Five Minds For The Future. And to my great surprise, I’m being facetious here, in the very first chapter he talks about the inadequacies of our educational system in preparing our kids for their future.

I’m actually not here to talk about his book today, I’ll do that at a later time.  it did prompted my thoughts about kids and their careers. I read two blog posts recently on the KS careers website. One talked about women in construction careers, the other talked about jobs in video gaming. It struck me that what we have traditionally done in schools, and continue to do in schools, does very little to prepare students for these kinds of careers.

These used to be considered nontypical careers. But more and more all careers are becoming nontypical. I often talk about careers in GPS/GIS. A year ago I didn’t even know there were careers in GPS/GIS. Then I visited with my friend, the president of North Central Kansas technical College, Clark Coco. He told me about their courses that prepare students for certification in GPS/GIS, and how today everything that is put in the ground, pillar, pipe or wire, in any way is mapped using GPS/GIS. Another nontypical career.

The point is that we prepare every student, graduating hundreds of thousands every year from K-12 schools, with virtually the same preparation, as if every one of their futures is going to be exactly the same. We mass-produce graduates. But more and more we don’t need thousands and thousands of students prepared with the same knowledge and skills. What we need are some, perhaps in the hundreds, students prepared to do thousands of different jobs.

We simply have to stop mass-producing the same kind of graduates. With the advancements in technology and knowledge about learning it is unconscionable that we haven’t applied that new learning to our schools in the 21st century. Everything in our world today, touching every aspect of our lives, has been customized and individualized … except our public education experiences. Preparing every student for the same standardized tests isn’t acceptable. In fact it’s detrimental to the individual student, to our society, and to our country. – Steve Wyckoff

“And yet most of the trouble businesses get into – in serving their customers and in general getting things done with dispatch – is directly attributable to the ugliness of their systems and processes. Over time, even a beautiful system tends to get elaborated and elaborated … and then more elaborated … with every change. Each one made of course, for a “good reason.” Until the whole ugly, sloppy, inefficient, demoralizing, dehumanizing, mess makes everybody unhappy. We end up “serving the system” rather than having the system serve us.” – Tom Peters

Yes.

I fear it is. It’s slow, almost imperceptible, but things are either standing dead still, which is the same as getting worse, or getting worse. But for me the most depressing part is we aren’t even dealing with the  most important educational issues. The only discussion going on among mainstream educators is about money, the lack of money, and what cuts to make because of the lack of money. Don’t get me wrong money is necessary but it is not sufficient. Even before the financial crisis when we had more money the only discussion was “we need more money.”

In any discussion about improving, we almost always  focus on how we get better at what we’ve always done. So I do agree, if we are going to get better at what we’ve always done it will absolutely take more money, lots more money. The problem is, even if we reach our goal, our kids aren’t prepared for the world they’ll be living in.

For years I have believed that when conditions changed dramatically, for whatever reason, schools would finally make real systemic change to improve the educational experiences of all kids. Well, conditions have changed dramatically. We’ve never experienced the kind of financial issues we are facing today. Yet, there are no conversations of significance about changing the paradigm of public education.

Are we in a death spiral? I’m afraid so. I hope I’m proven to be wrong, we have a lot to lose.  But there is no law that says the United States of America has to be the most dominant country in the world. Our dominant position in the world is not guaranteed. 100 years ago the most dominant country in the world was Great Britain. As the saying went, the sun never set on the British Empire. The British Empire lost that lofty status. So can we. The sun can set on us also.- Steve Wyckoff