If you read the last two blog posts, they focused on why it’s difficult to be innovative as an education administrator in America. The thesis is that we have structural rather than talent problems when it comes to innovation in American schools. It’s not that we have bad admin who don’t like change, it’s that we have a structure in place that doesn’t allow them to be great. The structure either doesn’t allow them to implement large scale change or it encourages safe, small tweaks in curriculum and instruction that maintain the status quo. We end up, paradoxically, failing by doing everything "right" because the structure is flawed. With this all in mind, it seems the solution for innovation needs to be a structural one.
The structure I think about the most is as old as time. As someone who spends his days pontificating on the greatness of American democracy to US History students, it pains me to say this: In education, we need dictators.
I’ve thought a lot about this because, at every school I’ve worked at, I’ve worked for administrators and with teachers that were incredibly smart, innovative, and that DID have the answers. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in conversation with colleagues about education and said “dang, you’re right, we should do that!”. Teachers and admin really DO have the answers and DO understand the monumental changes that we need to make if we’re ever really going to move the needle and improve learning in American schools. What we need to do is give them total freedom to make those changes. We need to make them the dictators of our schools.
…..but how do we do that in America, where we are publicly funded and overseen by an elected board that is responsible for hiring the most important policy maker in our district (the Superintendent)? To answer that question, let’s go to China, the home of authoritarianism-in-the-name-of-the-people.
When I taught in China, I worked for the International School at Hengyang YiZhang High School and at Hengyang YiZhang High School. The International School was private. Students had to qualify academically AND pay their way into the program. It specialized in preparing kids to go to college internationally by placing a greater emphasis on English and on preparing high schoolers for life in another country & education system. We had a Headmaster named Kitty (that was her English name) that was separate from the Headmaster of Hengyang YiZhang High School. We had a separate curriculum. We even had a separate building.
The cool thing is that, even though it was "private", we were considered as being within the larger public school. I taught the majority of my classes at the international school, but I also split time and taught classes in the public school of Hengyang Yi Zhang. It's a public school with thousands of students. It was ranked as the number one public high school in Hengyang, a city of about 8 million in southern China’s Hunan Province. Because the International School was connected to this public school, it shared resources with said school.
What that looked like on the ground was interesting. Our kids in the International School stayed within their specialized curriculum, but about half of the teachers that taught their classes came over from the public school to teach said classes. If our kids wanted to participate in extracurriculars, they did so with Hengyang Yi Zhang. They wore the same uniforms as the YiZhang students. They played on the same sports teams. They had some of the same teachers. They went to the same school wide assemblies. They had PE and ate lunch together. They had friends in both schools. So, from all outward appearances, they went to the same school. The difference in the educational experience of an International School student and a Public School Student was in curriculum. Everything else stayed the same. Could we apply that to America?
What if we created a system in America where edu professionals could apply for grants or aid through State Departments of Ed to pilot their ideas in public schools...by creating their own schools within said public schools? Using the International School at Hengyang Yi Zhang as a model, these new schools would share staff with the public school. They would only accept students from within the district in which they were implemented. Students accepted would be in both the new “innovation school” AND the broader public school. Students and parents could choose to be a part of the “innovation school” or not.
Make the process highly selective and based on a rigorous application process to whittle it down to only the best new ideas in education. Break the grants in to different categories. Let’s say a state wants to incentivize improvements in curriculum design, special education, and educating students of poverty. Create three grant and aid opportunities in those fields with a standardized application process. Open it up to any licensed educational professional in the state to apply: Paras, Teachers, Admin, Tech Coordinators, Special Ed Coordinators, etc (ie, the people that already know the solutions we need). Make it prestigious. Only accept one application in each of the categories, then award funding to pilot the program over a…..5 year period (?). This time would likely vary depending on the size and scope of the proposed idea, but you get the point. Winners of the grants / aid have total freedom to make decisions within their “innovation school” (i.e. they don’t have to follow the same state requirements as the broader public school). Make the only requirement be an annual report on the learning outcomes of the students within said program. In other words…..make the people in charge of the innovation schools educational dictators! ..... but couch them in a broader system of democracy (i.e. the Department of Edu) and accountability (i.e. annual progress reports).
If a given programs shows success over the course of its five year stint, find a way to implement it at a school wide level rather than just the smaller, “innovation school” cohort level. If a given program fails, learn from the failure and scrap the program. Chances are, there will be failures, but we have to try new things if we’re going to change and grow. By doing the “innovation school” within the larger public school, you minimize the impact of your failure on student learning. Given this chance of failure, you would also need to leave the option open for students or parents to opt out of programs if they didn’t feel their needs were being me (i.e. student choice).
While on the topic of student choice, this seems a good time to mention charter schools. The “innovation schools” mentioned here seem like a model for student choice that would avoid the logistical, political, and financial nightmare that has been seen in different parts of the country with charter schools. In Chicago, I work in a charter school network (Noble Charter Schools) that works for kids. Our schools serve some of the most challenging communities in the city and (I would argue), they are doing it much better than the Chicago Public Schools. This is due to a huge variety of reasons that aren’t the case in other charter schools networks in Chicago and in other charter school programs around the country. So the evidence that charter schools work is mixed, at best, and the political lightning rod they’ve created is only going to lead to more policy gridlock at a time when we need to make changes quickly…..and no system makes decisions more quickly than a dictatorship.
We have negative connotations of dictatorship in America, as we should. History rarely reflects back on them as beacons of human progress. That said, in education, I’m beginning to think of “dictatorship”, paradoxically, as synonymous with freedom. And we need to free the people with the answers (Admin, teachers, etc) to meet the needs of their kids however they see fit.
Obviously there are some immediate questions for this "innovation school" system. Where would the state get this funding? Why would the state sign on to give away very limited tax money for the express purpose of allowing schools to not follow all the laws the state put in place? How do you measure if a program is "successful" or not? What if one "innovation school" grant proposal requires more money than another one? Wouldn't school boards have to sign off on these innovation schools and, by doing so, wouldn't that sort of defeat the idea that the teacher or admin that proposed the program were 100% free to do what he or she wanted to do? I can't answer these given how hypothetical this all is, but ignoring these constraints for now, I think these "innovation schools" are at least one idea with the potential to address the structural flaws in our education system that bend us away from innovation and change. It's a pretty simple solution, I suppose: Put the people with the solutions in charge (teachers and admin) and get out of their way". Power to the....dicta....err, um....teachers!
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