Leading While Reforming:
The Ethical Obligation
to Destroy, Construct, and Connect
Ralph W. Tyler Lecture
Lesley University
July 25, 2012
Joseph P. McDonald
Several colleagues and I studied school reform in 4 places over 20 years: New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area. And we’ve attempted to capture that massive swath of practice in a relatively thin book of stories and exposition that will be published early next year.[1] It has a clear message for practice, backed up by a lot of research and couched in a good amount of nuance. But I’m going to put the message starkly today, absent much nuance and evidence. I feel comfortable doing that because –though I’ll talk for awhile – I won’t be the only person who talks this morning. You’re going to have a chance to talk back. I’m going to keep track of the points I make up here with some slides – and along the way I encourage you to pick a few points that you want to explore – maybe you’ll want to challenge a claim, maybe you’ll want to ask about the evidence, maybe – I hope – you’ll want to say something about how what I say either does or does not jibe with your experience. More about this at the end of the talk.
Anybody who does something like what I’m about to do – namely take a research-based account of practice and reflect it back to people who know practice as well as you - walks in the shadow of Ralph Tyler. But few have the blessing of having his name attached to their reports – as I do here in giving this Ralph W.Tyler Lecture – and I am very honored.
In about 1984, when one of my mentors, Ted Sizer, was about to found the Coalition of Essential Schools, he asked Ralph Tyler for advice. And one of the things that Tyler told him was that he should not expect his reforms to endure within the particular schools he worked with, but rather within the practices of the people who once worked there. That’s one of the ideas that informs this talk – so you might say that I’ll be channeling Ralph Tyler. Of course, I’m channeling Ted Sizer too. It was Ted’s Annenberg Challenge that was the spur for our study. Then - to add even more to my responsibilities here - I’ll be channeling Don Schon (another of my mentors). Don was the original leader of the study before he died, and his idea of a theory of action was at the heart of the study, and of the book and this lecture. A theory of action links a reform’s intentions, designs, and actions – which otherwise want to be running off in different directions.
So let’s get down to business. We’ll start with the title of the talk. It’s really a shrinklit. Check out a 1980 book by Maurice Sagoff called Shrinklits: 70 of the world’s towering classics cut down to size.[2] Here’s one of my favorite shrinklits – for Alice in Wonderland:
Holed up
With bunny -
Pre-teen
Acts funny.
Aberrations!
Hallucinations!
Wild Scenes: Tarts and Queens -
Clearly she needs therapy.
And here is the opening of the shrinklit for Beowulf. It captures the part where the Dane warriors are gathering every night in the meadhouse, telling stories and drinking, all the while worried that Grendel the Monster may break in during the early morning and kill them.
Monster Grendel’s tastes were plainish:
Breakfast? Just a couple danish.
I know my title is not witty like a shrinklit, but at least it gives you an advanced organizer. I am talking here to leaders who are already or in the process of becoming reformers. You’re becoming reformers as an implicit facet of the scholarship you are acquiring here. What I will be talking about this morning is: (1) the ethical basis of your obligation to be what I’ll call a leader-reformer; and (2) 4 jobs that are associated with being a leader-reformer – all of them manifesting dimensions of the cycle of destruction, construction, and connection.
Why You Need to be a School Reformer: An Opportunity and a Crisis
Two big things happened in the U. S. over the last couple of decades - and they have a continually unfolding impact that you have to deal with– and this unfolding impact is the basis of your ethical obligation to be leader-reformers. The first big thing involves changes in the conception and design of school, school systems, teaching, and learning – changes, I would say, in the “constitution” of American schooling, and the most significant ones since the early 20th century. So we’ve seen the development and proliferation of charter schools, or publicly funded schools operated by private groups which may be non-profit or for-profit entities. Washington, D.C. now educates more than 40 percent of its students in charter schools, and New Orleans more than 60 percent. Over the course of the last decade, the development of charter schools has been among the major reform strategies of several other cities too – for example, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia. But chartering is not just a city thing. It’s a metropolitan thing, and a key reform strategy of many state departments of education, and, of course, of the U.S. Department of Education – by the way, across Republican and Democratic administrations.
We have also seen the development and proliferation of design-based networks of schools, both charter and not: Green Dot schools, Expeditionary Learning schools, KIPP schools, Big Picture schools, and so on. These designs challenge the traditional conception of the school district. Some of the designs also use Web 2.0 technologies to challenge what was once a sharp distinction between in-school and out-of-school, and severely undercut traditional pedagogies. Indeed, Web 2.0 technologies combined with new research on learning have vastly complicated many people’s ideas of how schooling should work and they will likely transform how schooling does work before many more years have passed. So school districts as we know them are changing, classrooms are changing, and teaching as we have long understood it is changing. Beginning in the 1990s, teachers were urged to teach to specified learning targets – for the first time in American education - and to have zero tolerance for missing the targets. Then, increasingly over the next two decades, they were held accountable for meeting these targets for all students. For their part, students were increasingly held accountable for reaching levels of intellectual achievement that earlier generations of Americans would have considered unreachable by most people. In the process, standardized testing increased exponentially with great consequences for curriculum, schools, teachers, and students. Indeed, the consequences have been so disturbing to so many people that we are likely to see a major transformation in testing systems within the next several years. The two testing consortia funded by federal dollars are busy developing blueprints for this. So add standardized testing to the list of things that are changing. Go further and add textbooks and other sources and artifacts of what we call curriculum. Even add the idea of curriculum itself – which is certainly an implicit target of Web 2.0 technolgies as applied to teaching.
Now am I saying all these changes are good? No. Nor am I what I call a millenialist – that is, somebody who yearns for a golden age of education and imagines that with just the right policy push, it can be achieved – you know, all children on grade level in all sub-groups by 2014! I am instead a tinkerer, an evolutionist. I welcome diversity of educational forms and policies for what their presence may over time contribute under conditions of a continual and collective struggle to improve. Let me say that again: under conditions of a continual and collective struggle to improve.
One part of your ethical obligation, as I see it, is to be part of this struggle. In the wake of great educational diversification – again, more diversification than Americans have experienced in a hundred years – you have an obligation to be part of the struggle that exploits it – exploits it for a good purpose. The other part of the ethical obligation that I hereby encumber you with has to do with that purpose. The purpose I recommend involves addressing a new crisis of inequality. It is one that has creeped up on us as the result of the second big thing that has happened over the last couple of decades. The crisis is well documented in recent studies co-sponsored by the Russell Sage and Spencer Foundations, and published in a weighty volume entitled Whither Opportunity?[3] Among other startling findings, the contributing researchers report that the role of education as an equalizer within American society has declined, and the long-term rise in educational attainment among Americans has halted. One contributor to the volume, Sean Reardon, reports that the “achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families [as measured in test scores] is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years earlier.”[4] This gap grew much larger even as – happily - the historic achievement gap between white and black Americans narrowed. Another contributor to the volume, Brian Rowan, reports that the proportion of high-poverty schools in the United States (defined as schools with more than three-quarters of the student body eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) jumped from 12 percent in the late 1990s to 17 percent a decade later – and that’s before the great recession hit. And according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 20 percent of American elementary children attend such schools.[5]
Over most of the 20th century, economic growth in combination with education raised the incomes and the life prospects of rich and poor alike, but beginning in the 1980’s, the rich began benefiting disproportionately from continuing economic growth, and to a degree not characteristic of European and Asian nations experiencing similar growth in the same time frame. The widening American income gap has exacerbated already existing educational inequality in myriad ways. These include increased segregation of schools by income – especially elementary schools – and not just in cities but in metropolitan areas. They also include very significant dimensions of educational inequality that affect children before they reach school – but which school ends up addressing (though unsuccessfully overall as it turns out). For example, single parents (disproportionately clustered among the poor) have less time for parenting young children, as do parents working multiple jobs to cover basic living costs.[6] Meanwhile, parents with surplus income tend to invest heavily in what Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation,” or the intensive organization of childhood around intellectual development.[7] Concerted cultivation can go to absurd lengths – for example, showing babies DVDs on Shakespeare – or engaging in aggressive academic red-shirting (the practice of holding back age-eligible children from kindergarten in order to give them a competitive advantage over peers) (Katz, 2000). It can even involve intensive standardized test preparation for 3- and 4-year-olds. Meanwhile, there is a growing amount of what might be called the opposite of concerted cultivation - where childhood is organized around deprivation. This happens, for example, when it is marked by maternal depression, violence, substance abuse, pervasive environmental toxicity, or chronic and under-treated disease – all of these circumstances more likely under conditions of poverty. In the face of the educationally, socially, and economically disturbing trends of the last two decades, we need leader-reformers who work to enlarge the typical American approach to school reform. It can’t just be about kids’ and teachers’ and schools’ accountability. It has to take seriously the impact of poverty on schools. It has to involve coalitions with parents and other sources of social capital in the community.
Destroy, Construct, Connect
It’s important for you to understand that the three verbs that follow the colon in the title of my talk go together. I don’t advocate destruction absent construction and also connection. Destruction signifies the fact that reform means change, and change is always to some extent threatening to stakeholders and it always engenders resistance. Construction signifies the fact that reform needs action space with real resources to support it – three kinds of resources in particular: professional capacity, civic capacity (from both grassroots and elite sources), and money. And finally, connection signifies that the real impact of all reform unfolds over time and therefore that real reformers must build on each other’s work.
I believe that you are ethically obligated to engage in this cycle, and this means embedding 4 jobs inside your regular day job – your leader’s job. In what follows, I lay out these jobs one at a time, though none of them stands alone. They are linked by the cycle of destroy, construct, connect.
Job 1: Taking action
School reform requires two paradoxical kinds of action, and school reformers need to know this and tolerate whatever discomfort they may feel as a result. On the one hand, a reformer must confront low expectations, short-circuit existing systems, subvert prevailing cultures, and change long-standing patterns of behavior. These are all destructive actions. On the other hand, the reformer must engage in constructive actions too, like offering stakeholders the vision of a different kind of schooling, raising resources for action space, and fashioning a coherent and useful theory of action. To understand the paradox at the heart of job 1, it helps to think of the Hindu god Shiva, often depicted as a dancer whose continuous dancing within a ring of fire simultaneously burns down the world and re-creates it from the ashes. Like images from other religions – for example, the crucifixion of Christ – this image is meant to point beyond apparent reality and to generate hope in the face of despair. On what is obviously a more mundane level, leader-reformers do the same.