Oct 1, 2018

My Analysis of Another Errant and Poorly Conceived Article by Gadfly Ted Kolderie

Ted Kolderie is a particular irritating gadfly buzzing around K-12 education.

 
Here are my incisive comments, interspersed among the paragraphs of another errant Kolderie offering in the Star Tribune (30 September 2018):
 
Ted Kolderie, “How to Bust Through the Inertia in the Public Schools,” Star Tribune, 30 September 2018
 
The public schools are stagnant.  Leaders and would-be leaders must stop resisting questions as to how a big systems can be changed.
 
After decades of discouraging reports about student learning, Minnesotans are entitled to hear serious ideas from their elected officials and candidates about how to improve so important a system as public education.
 
My Comment:
 
The most important candidates from whom to get views on K-12 education are school board candidates.  This November, voters will have two genuine options to exercise.  Jenny Arneson (District #1), Siad Ali (District #3), and Nelson Inz (District #5) are running unopposed;  this is particularly lamentable in the case of Inz, who is a tool of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers(MFT) and the Democrat-Farmer Labor (DFL) party.  The genuine voter options are found among the four candidates for At-Large positions, of whom voters may select two:  Kim Caprini, Sharon El-Amin, Josh Pauly, and Rebecca Gagnon.  Of those, Caprini (despite her MFT endorsement) is the best candidate.  Gagnon must be defeated.  El-Amin is the better option to exercise over the MFT-endorsed Pauly.   
 
We are not getting that discussion:   we’re not getting good thinking about why academic performance is so flat and progress is so slow.
 
My Comment:
 
The discussion is occurring in many places.  This blog, with its numerous and ever increasing readership, thrusts the most important ideas on K-12 education into the public sphere, and I conduct on a weekly basis numerous conversations with people in all manner of positions at which difference in K-12 education can be made---  most particularly at the Minneapolis Public Schools.
 
These people all are now pondering the matters that I have discussed in 782 informationally packed articles on this blog, offering the best thinking anywhere on issues pertinent to an excellent K-12 education.
 
Democratic candidates, here as everywhere, talk about “adequate funding” and early childhood programs.  Republicans talk about choice and vouchers.  Everyone deplores the low level of learning;  everyone wants better results.  Few talk seriously about what’s causing the problems or what realistically to do about them.
 
My Comment:
 
The problems are caused by 1) weak curriculum, 2) wretched teacher training, 3) lack of aggressive, highly intentional skill remediation, and 4) failure to reach out to help struggling families right where they live.
 
Heavy focus on the “achievement gap” might suggest the education problem exists only in Minneapolis and St. Paul.  It’s better, actually to think about “the gap” between what students everywhere in Minnesota are learning and what they should---  or could---  be learning.
 
My Comment:
 
Students should at the K-5 level be acquiring logically grade-by-grade sequenced knowledge and skill sets in mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), history, economics, psychology, world and ethnic literature, English usage, and fine arts (visual and musical).  At grades 6-8, this subject area emphasis should continue, with increasing attention to the study of world languages.  At grades 9-12, all students but those facing vexing mental challenges should be academically prepared  to take Advanced Placement courses and to focus on electives that meeting their driving interests in the liberal, vocational, and technological arts.
 
The effort to get at the policy problem in K-12 should begin with a conversation about what and where the problem is.
 
My Comment:
 
Never a graceful or clear writer, Kolderie at this point goes into a long ramble that indicates concern for educational design from the perspective of Tom Veblen and others in the professional universe of consultants and theorists of organization.
 
Be aware of the scant relevance to the most vexing problems of K-12 education, then be very attentive to my next comments a few paragraphs hence.
 
Consultant Tom Veblen identifies problem-definition as the most difficult challenge problem solvers face.  He grew up in Hallock, Minn., worked 20 years for Cargill, was in the first class of White House Fellows in 1965-66 and spent the rest of his career as a consultant for organizations in the “world food system.”
 
The education policy discussion is a kind of consulting.
 
“Deep-seated problems,” Veblen writes, “are multi-dimensional and excruciatingly difficult to define.  This means the diagnostic phase of a consulting engagement is indispensable.
 
“Most clients don’t see it that way… . Only when the things they have tried have failed do they seek outside help.  Paid to developed define and solve problems, they are hardly disposed to question their own understanding… .  They seek treatment, not diagnosis… .  and the client almost always has a wrong definition [of the problem], an almost always eloquently states wrong definition… .”
 
That fits education, which has long resisted questions about organizational design.  For years its leadership insisted the problem was that the Legislature was not providing enough money. The “Nation at Risk Report” in 1983 declared a need for change, but when ensuing discussions about “restructuring” led nowhere, the notion developed that the educational system and the structure of the school were fine.  The problem was low performance and lack of accountability.  From that came the push for standards and testing.
 
Today it’s clearer that the problem is one of design.  Institutions are designed for the job they’re assigned to perform.  They need to be redesigned when the job changes.  Over many years Minnesota has redesigned most of its governmental institutions but has been slow to get to public education.  Until recently we were trying to meet a (now) 21st century challenge with a system of schools designed for a 19th century society and economy.
 
My Comment:
 
Weak curriculum and teaching staff are the central dilemmas facing K-12 education.  Kolderie has no understanding of design for an excellent education, which is a matter of excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all demographic descriptors.  Redesign should focus on overhaul of curriculum for knowledge intensity, training of teachers capable of delivering such a curriculum, the delivery of skill remediation with great specificity according to student need, and the delivery of and referral for services for the families of students struggling with dilemmas of poverty and functionality.
 
Between 1985 and 1991, however, the state made a critical start.  In opening the system, it ended the public-utility arrangement.  Interdistrict enrollment meant students no longer had to go to school where they lived.  The postsecondary option and chartering made it possible for organizations other that the school district to offer public education.
 
That dramatic change shapes today’s policy challenge, which is for the state to give school districts the flexibility to pick up the new approaches to learning  and the different forms of school appearing in other districts and states, in the charter sector and, increasingly, online.
 
My Comment:
 
Post-Secondary Options (PSO) provide opportunities for students to attend college and university classes and earn post-secondary training while still in high school;  lamentably, very few students are academically prepared to digest information delivered by college professors:  One-third of students need remedial education once matriculating on college and university campuses, and very few students have the information bases that they need to thrive as they should in the collegiate and university experience.
 
As to charter schools, these have been a disaster, draining resources and attention from the mainline public schools while offering a quality of education that is even worse than that found in locally centralized school districts.  
 
And online learning has not proven effective for a significant percentage of students;   it is not at all appropriate for students with critical academic needs and very challenging life circumstances, who need a great deal of attention from skilled and caring teachers.
 
Two decades ago, three leading superintendents saw that need:  Don Helmstetter, then president of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators (MASA), Tom Nelson, a former commissioner of education, and Jim Walker, a Minnesota “superintendent of the year,” asked their associations to urge the Legislature to enlarge district’s ability to respond.  MASA and the school boards association listened.  But they did nothing.
 
Since 1998, the need has only grown, with still no initiative from the K-12 associations.  Clearly, action will require a political push---  which is what has moved education policy in this state before.
 
With five weeks to go in the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, Wendell Anderson came out for a Citizens League proposal to restore equalization in school finance;  he won---  and saw the “Minnesota Miracle” enacted in a bipartisan way in 1971.
 
In 1985, Gov. Rudy Perpich endorsed a proposal from the Minnesota Business partnership for interdistrict choice.  It was in operation by 1988.  State Rep. Connie Levi attached the postsecondary option to that legislation.  In 1991, state Sen. Ember Reichgott and state Rep. Becky Kelso championed chartering.
 
My Comment:
 
Neither choice nor chartering have proven effective in providing excellent K-12 education, which must come from programmatic initiatives as I have indicated (curriculum overhaul, teacher training, skill remediation, provision of and referral for needed social services).  Choice and chartering are distractions from the needed focused attention of decision-makers at the level of the locally centralized school district.
 
Interestingly, most (not all) expansion of choice has been pushed through by DFLers.  This is not surprising:  The support for choice is largely in the party’s constituency.  It is found among parents who themselves have not finished or gone beyond high school;  among lower-income families;  in the cities;  and among people of color.
 
My Comment:
 
In fact, most young people stuck in cyclical generational poverty receive their education in the locally centralized school district, where the needed change must occur, in those areas that I have indicated.  
 
State action needn’t be a mandate.  To increase the capacity of school districts to adapt, the Legislature could do now what it did years ago to enlarge the capacity of (then) “village” governments to handle the rush of suburban development after World War II.  The state established in law three “optional plans” designed to help municipalities meet their challenges and a process by which one of the plans could be adopted by local voters.  (For early thinking about possible new forms of school district organization, go to http://bit.ly/SelfImprovingSystem .)
 
The question will then be what a redesigned district should do.
 
My Comment:
 
Federal and state programs in the United States have only funding and resource equity implications.  The best school systems in the world (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, Finland, Canada, and Australia) design systems at the national level for the delivery of a consistent excellence of education throughout the nation.  But in the United States we have a mania for local control, so that the needed programmatic overhaul must come at the level of the locally centralized school district.
 
Getting beyond the status quo will require a fundamentally new approach to change.  The tradition has been to make marginal improvements on the familiar way of doing things.  Boards are usually ready with ideas of that sort, about how “we”---  from the top---  will now do better.  The hard thing is to move beyond the traditional:  toward personalized learning, letting students move at their own pace, making learning project-based, delegating more decisions to the schools.
 
My Comment:
 
Kolderie has no understanding of the needed transformation in K-12 education in the United States:
We need greater commonality of curriculum for an equitable excellence of education;  students should be challenged to move at the greatest possible pace along with their grade level peers and to move as rapidly as possible toward advanced levels of knowledge and skill acquisition;  projects are an inefficient way to deliver a bevy of knowledge and skill sets, so that impartation by a skilled teacher in lecture and whole-class discussion is far more effective;  and curriculum should be established at the level of the locally centralized school district for delivery to all students at given grade levels.     
 
Please read on through these next Kolderie offerings before returning to my comments several paragrpahs hence.
 
Not everyone is ready for the radically different.  Those wanting the different will be the minority, opposed by the majority that emphatically does not.
 
Centralized as it is, districts do not do “different” well.  Boards find the different politically uncomfortable.  Different can create controversy and animosity, can complicate an election.  It seems more practical to keep things the same across the schools and down through time.
 
So, with opinion divided, proposals for major change are likely to be rejected---  or so heavily compromised as to have little effect.
 
“Radical” change “at scale” is a contradiction in terms.
 
Success lies in starting small, with those who are ready for change;  devolving decisions about learning to the schools and the teachers, then letting their innovations spread as others find they too are ready.  This is the way large systems change, as illustrated in the famous curve graph of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations:  with new ideas flowing from “early adopters” to the “laggards.”
 
The reality of gradual change will distress those pushing to have all schools to become better now.  But the Legislature cannot enact good schools:  It can only create a system that will in time create good schools.
 
What’s needed is a form of district organization where leadership fosters “a climate of encouragement for innovation at the front-line level”---  to take historian Paul Kennedy’s description in his book “Engineers of Victory” of the role of leadership in winning World War II.
 
The state needs to move districts into a new model that is able to do both incremental and radical change, both innovation and improvement---  and is willing to allow teachers more involvement in professional issues, from which they were excluded when bargaining appeared in 1960.  The idea is for schools to focus on ways to motivate teachers and students.  Larger professional responsibilities will motivate teachers.  Personalizing learning will motivate students.  Motivation matters for engagement, and engagement matters for learning.
 
Letting teachers lead the learning is the approach most conspicuously not yet tried for public education.  It is time for it to be tried.  Teachers will change school more dramatically than boards will.
 
The political leadership will find support for that.  Thoughtful superintendents and board members understand they have to make their schools attractive---  and so they have to change.  Mayors and city council members want schools doing more vocational programs, to help their local economies.  There is widespread interest in---  and support for--- enlarging teachers’ professional roles (see www.teacherpower.org).   Significant interest exists now inside the unions.
 
DFLers and Republicans will argue about the half of education policy that involves money.  Imagine if they would agree on the policy half---  agree, literally, that whichever party wins, Minnesota will have self-improving systems of public education with innovation developing in the charter, alternative and online sectors and diffusing gradually through the district sector.
 
On such a pro-district, pro-teacher, pro-student agenda, why wouldn’t they agree?
 
My Comment:
 
This is mushy Kolderie-think.  Nothing about Kolderie’s approach is pro-district, pro-teacher, or pro-student.  His approach gives no attention to the needed change at the district level, gives no attention to the weakness of teacher training or the needed remedy in teacher retraining, and is distinctly anti-student in denying students of all demographic descriptors a knowledge-intensive, skill replete education.
 
In private moments, former president of the Minnesota Education Association Bob Astrup described public education as “torqued out”---  like the stick-shift car that in first gear will go no faster no matter how much gas you give it.  It was time, he meant, to give it another gear.
 
The auto industry introduced automatic transmissions in the 1940s.  It’s time to create something like that for public education, arranging for school ---  teaching and learning---  to shift smoothly into new and different forms as needs change and opportunities arise.
 
My Comment:
 
Decision-makers at the level of the locally centralized school district should be focused on curriculum overhaul, teacher training, skill remediation, and counsel to struggling families much more than they should be distracted by goofy metaphors from the Ted Kolderie collection.


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