A Case for Reinventing Public Schools
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Posts from — July 2008

Should schools be allowed to paddle young people?

by mkaufman

Oh, I forgot to include paddling as an appropriate form of discipline! 

Here’s an article about a school board that is voting to allow corporal punishment in schools. This is abuse and should be outlawed! But this is included in the ‘theory’ being employed in schools to ‘force’ young people to be obedient. If you can’t provide something young people are interested in you shouldn’t be in business! 


School board brings back paddling with parental permission
By JULIE HUBBARD – The Telegraph in Macon
JEFFERSONVILLE, GA. –Twiggs County principals will be pulling out their dusty paddles when school resumes and using them when students act up.
At least that’s the school system’s aim.

Will the public school system ever provide something that young people are interested in and want to participate in? Or does mandatory – by law – mean “do anything to force young people to sit in their chairs, pay attention, and regurgitate bits of data?”

This makes me sad…

July 23, 2008   No Comments

External vs Internal Motivation and the Theory of Knowledge

by mkaufman

More and school states and school districts are developing programs designed to ‘motivate’ students to improve on standardized tests. Combine that with incentive programs for teachers to improve test scores and we have a train wreck in the making.
I still marvel at the fact that good, well meaning people, have a limited understanding of how people (and the brain) actually work. Unless of course these aren’t well meaning people (which I refuse to think about). 
Everyone acts from theory – whether they are aware of it or not. The brain develops ‘models’ of the world and how it works and we behave consistent with those models (even abhorrent behavior is consistent with some mental model in the brain). 
So what are the theories in use by the people that develop policies for the public schooling system? It appears, from where I sit, the theory employed in school policy and practice includes:
  • people need extrinsic motivation
  • incentives motivate people
  • memory is learning
  • control and compliance are highly valued
  • learning is teacher and testing centric
  • memory and tests demonstrate ‘knowledge’ 
  • order and discipline are requirements for learning
  • school can be disconnected from life
  • curriculum determines what is learned
  • schooling develops good people
  • emotions have no place at school
  • people aren’t people when they are at school
  • school is disconnected from the rest of life
The public schooling system is the one institution that touches just about every single person in the country. There is tremendous ‘potential’ there. But what happens when we use extrinsic motivation and incentives to ‘produce’ an outcome?
Extrinsic motivation slowly destroys self esteem, dignity, cooperation and a yearning for learning – all of which are innate and high early in life. They are diminished throughout our life by what Dr. Deming calls the forces of destruction – of which extrinsic motivation is one of these destructive forces.

To paraphrase Mary Walton’s presentation on Dr. Deming’s teaching on performance appraisals, such an approach will “encourage short-term performance…discourage risk-taking, build fear, undermine teamwork, and pit people working against each other for the same rewards.” (“The Deming Management Method,” chapter 19, page 91). As Dr. Deming noted in “The New Economics,” Ch. 4, p. 113, “When children are given rewards, such as toys and money, for doing well in school…they learn to expect rewards for good performance.” This leaves the child, and then the adult, extrinsically motivated, relying on “things to make them feel good.” And that destroys essential self-esteem. Dr. Deming expanded on this in pages 147-153.

So what should schools do? Here’s a quote from a review of Dr. Deming’s book, The New Economics.

To achieve notable improvement, the education system should abolish grades, merit ratings for teachers, comparison of schools on the basis of scores, and gold stars for athletics. Joy in learning comes more from learning than from what is learned. A grade is a permanent label for opening doors or closing doors, a way to achieve quality by inspection, rather than building in quality, a way to produce competition between people, rather than cooperation, a way to label people as winners or losers, a way to humiliate those at the bottom, rather than to promote their desire to learn and future achievement.

The California legislature has passed a law (awaiting the governor’s signature) authorizing and encouraging school districts to provide non monetary “incentives to middle ad and high school students for achievement or improvement on standardized tests.”

Here’s an article about this.

July 23, 2008   2 Comments

What Does Architecture Tell Us About Learning?

by mkaufman

Over the last 20+ years my firm has worked with large groups to accelerate and enhance their ability to learn and collaborate. This work results in increasing the productivity of the group – often accomplishing weeks, months, or years worth of work in a matter of days. To aide us in accomplishing these results we use a creative physical environment that allows information to move along with the people (most everything in the environment has wheels!).

The idea that human interaction can be enhanced by the environment is something we take for granted. It is so much a part of what we do we often forget that this way of thinking and working is not common for much of the world. 
The concept that work environments can contribute to or inhibit the productivity of the people in those environments is not new.  What might be new however is the idea that the people that work in the environment could/should participate in the design process – to determine the environment within which they will work.
From an article in Education Week by Frank Kelly:
Buildings are among the most telling artifacts of what we believe, what we value, and what we think. Western Europe’s great cathedrals built in the 12th to 16th centuries leave no doubt about what was most important in their time. While our society in the 21st century is far more diverse, our buildings will speak just as clearly to future generations—including the kids who attend our schools.

What do our school buildings say about what we think is really important? What do schools being built in 2008 around Frederick W. Taylor’s and William Wirt’s ideas from 1908 say to kids about their futures? What do schools that mimic the architecture of other centuries say to the children within them working on digital devices? Are our school buildings saying what we want to convey to teachers and students?

Schools are inherently about the future. We design school facilities to house the education of students for their futures, and we plan those facilities to last for decades. Our challenge is heightened by the most rapid change in all of human history—Moore’s Law, which defines the exponential growth in digital technology, is quickening the pace of change in every aspect of our society. In planning new or renovated school facilities, educators and architects are “futurists’’—the question is whether we recognize and fulfill the responsibility thrust upon us.
What does the architecture of our school buildings tell us about the activities that take place in them? How do those buildings influence learning (positively or negatively)? How can we re-conceive the physical environment so it encourages and enables the type of learning required for success in the 21st Century?
In the 70′s I came upon a book that contained photographs of the architecture – buildings – of schools, hospitals, and prisons. I haven’t been able to find that book but I did find some photos that might give an idea of what this book showed. 
School, Hospital, or Prison? When looking at the pictures that follow, which one is a school, a hospital, or a prison?






What does this say about the way we think about the activities that take place in each of these buildings? 
In a recent NY Times article entitled, Technology Reshapes America’s Classrooms, it suggested the activities in the ‘school of the future’ will be different from the activities that take place in the current schools. But what does the building look like? Have they considered the physical environment when developing this new school? Were teachers involved in the design process to ‘re-think’ the way they interacted with young people, the type of learning taking place and how the physical environment might enable this?
Here’s a short quote from that article:
Education experts say her school, the Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School in Boston, offers a glimpse into the future.

It has no textbooks. Students receive laptops at the start of each day, returning them at the end. Teachers and students maintain blogs. Staff and parents chat on instant messaging software. Assignments are submitted through electronic “drop boxes” on the school’s Web site.

“The dog ate my homework” is no excuse here.

The experiment at Frederick began two years ago at cost of about $2 million, but last year was the first in which all 7th and 8th grade students received laptops. Classwork is done in Google Inc’s free applications like Google Docs, or Apple’s iMovie and specialized educational software like FASTT Math.

“Why would we ever buy a book when we can buy a computer? Textbooks are often obsolete before they are even printed,” said Debra Socia, principal of the school in Dorchester, a tough Boston district prone to crime and poor schools.

We won’t really see different types of knowledge, behaviors and skills being learned in our schools until we see the types of environments that learning takes place in re-thought and re-designed.
Answers: the pictures above from top to bottom are   1) hospital   2) prison   3) hospital   4) hospital   5) prison   6) school   7) school – (the label on this was ‘school for blacks’)

July 15, 2008   No Comments

Sensitivity to Initial Conditions

by mkaufman

There is a concept in the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) that suggests systems are significantly influenced by their initial conditions. Complex Adaptive Systems develop patterns of ‘order’ that emerge out of the seemingly chaotic ‘soup’ of interactions between lots and lots of ‘agents’ (independent agents following ‘rules’ to guide their behavior). 

Anyone that has been involved with public education can see that the school system is a very complex system. There are a great many rules that guide the behavior of everyone involved (everyone! including parents, teachers, administrators, young people, and the communities in which schools exist).
I’ve been in many situations over the last 25 years where teachers and administrators were asked, what the future of school ‘should be.’ Or they were asked, what kinds of things would need to happen to make schools ‘ideal.’ 
The kinds of answers that were given will not surprise anyone. These answers have been the same or similar with a few variations in almost every setting I’ve been in. 
The kinds of things that were suggested included:
  • community involvement
  • parent involvement
  • creativity
  • personalized learning
  • problem solving
  • thinking skills
  • alternative assessments
  • choice
  • brain-based learning
I could go on – but the point is, when asked, most people want the same or similar things for schools (and for the young people) but why aren’t those thing happening? or better said, why aren’t those things happening in a systematic and systemwide way (all of these things are happening in little bits somewhere in some school or district – but no where is the kind of schooling we need for young people to be successful in the 21st Century happening in a systemic way).
Why is that? 
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.
In other posts in this blog I have written about some of the original conditions. 
The free public school system was created to ‘school’ the 20% of the young people that were too poor to attend a private (meaning a paid) school. The intention for this free public school system was to provide ‘the basics’ (reading, writing, and arithmetic) so that these poor young people would be good citizens and there would be less crime.
In another recent post the origins of the high school system was discussed. High schools were designed to educate about 5% of the young men in this country so they could make the connection between elementary school and higher education (college). High schools were designed to be ‘feeder’ schools for colleges.
From a recent article by ASCD Executive Director, Gene Carter: 
This month, as high school students across the United States receive their diplomas, our failure to improve that system will be evident in the number of students who don’t. Studies of graduation rates indicate that nearly one-third of high school students drop out before graduating. That means that one student drops out every 26 seconds; between 6,000 and 7,000 drop out every school day; and 1.2 million drop out every year. Among African American and Hispanic students, the graduation rate is about 55 percent, or roughly one in every two students.

Furthermore, the studies raise questions about whether the students who do graduate will be prepared with the problem-solving, critical-thinking, and oral and written communication skills needed to succeed in an increasingly global market—questions that are echoed in the public’s perception of high schools as reported in last year’s Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll. The poll found that 40 percent of respondents do not think most public school students leave high school prepared for college, while 50 percent think the same students do not leave school prepared to do skilled jobs.

Today the cry is to transform schools to teach 21st Century Skills. These include life and career skills, innovation and learning skills, as well as information, media and technology skills.

It is clear that schools and schooling as we know them have not changed much since their conception. Sensitivity to initial conditions – and the patterns initially established when schools were first implemented – make changing schools very difficult. Even when we know what ‘should be done’ it still isn’t. 
That makes me think that we need to change our thinking about what schools and schooling are, why they exist, and what they should do. Schools and schooling must be re-conceived and re-designed if we are to establish patterns that can be useful and successful now and in the future.

July 4, 2008   2 Comments