Inventive improvement
The mother of invention isn’t desire. Or hope, dreams or wishful thinking. It’s necessity. The seed wisdom of the centuries-old adage is that it’s difficult to be an agent of change unless change becomes necessary. Because as long as change is only an option, any situ- ational status quo can be rationalized as acceptable, tolerable, inevitable, unchangeable, etc.
One of the biggest lesson examples of this is the decline and fall of retail behemoth Sears Roebuck & Co.
In the late 1960s, Sears had no interest in making large-store shopping available in small towns. Left up to Sears, residents there would always have to order from a catalog or drive to a suburban shopping mall. That was fine with Sears, whether or not it was fine with consumers.
The only way change would come to the retail industry dominated by Sears was from outside its braintrust.
From someone willing to rethink the whole thing entirely, and to dismiss preconceived conclusions based on longstanding conditions.
Sam Walton didn’t have a Harvard education or national retail experience. In the eyes of the pedigreed merchandising elites at Sears, he probably would have been seen as little more than a five-and-dime country bumpkin.
His idea was born from a completely different perspective about underserved consumers and shopping, and he built his company and its operations and processes toward that end. Sears was convinced that the only way to succeed in retail was the way it had done it. The inertia of bureaucratic momentum was at full force, and Sears execs had well-documented reasons at every turn why the Walmart model wouldn’t work. They were blind to invention, because they were awash in comfortable, generational success. No necessity, no invention.
Public education today is like Sears. It dominates the K-12 learning landscape in terms of schools, students, teachers, curricula, systems and funding. And yet it continues to underperform at delivering wholesale learning.
Student educational performance is the product of many factors, of course, several of which schools don’t control. And that excuse might be more palatable if education spending didn’t keep growing without corresponding increases in test scores. If schools represent X percent of all learning factors, and we increase the investment in X, that should create some improvement. Otherwise, if schools’ impact on student learning is totally dissociated from dollars invested, why ever raise education budgets?
Last week I mentioned Boston Public Schools, which currently spend $31,000 per pupil—a whopping $400,000-plus investment in a K-12 graduate. Yet nearly three out of four BPS graduates can’t score as proficient on standardized tests. The average score for Boston students now is about the same as it was in 2003, when per-pupil spending was less than half of what it is today.
There are comparable situations all over, where school districts are spending millions on graduating classes in which large percentages of students aren’t very educated.
The education system as it exists has little to no interest in pursuing wholesale change. Like Sears of old, its leadership and bureaucracy is busy doing what it’s always done, and drums up all kinds of justifications why its way is the best way.
It’s hard to say how out of balance the high spending/low test scores ratio has to get before necessity becomes a tipping point for invention in education reinvention. But incrementalism hasn’t worked so far, and probably isn’t going to work at all.
Gov. Sarah Sanders is a national leader in bold thinking about education, but her LEARNS Act has produced rending of garments and gnashing of teeth among the education establishment—and that legislation isn’t close to an entire rethinking of public schools.
Sears had hired the best and most brilliant minds for retail, and many rode the giant to ruin in perplexed disbelief that their data, analysis and strategy conclusions could be wrong. Like Sears, the education establishment is resistant to envisioning revolutionary change because it doesn’t, can’t or won’t see such change as necessary.
If single-digit proficiency isn’t a necessity for educational invention, what is?
The 180-day school year, classrooms with desks lined up and a teacher in front, seven-period days—the traditional hallmarks of 20th century pedagogy—are now older than the Sears catalog was when Walmart Stores incorporated in 1969. Everything should be rethought, and possibly chunked, in schools where eight or nine out of 10 kids have poor test scores.
A good starting place is categorizing schools by size, the same way big is routinely differentiated from small in most other industry sectors.
Human resource and employee benefits laws are different for big businesses and small businesses, as are government and tax reporting requirements. Big banks are subject to different regulations than small banks. Large hospitals operate under different rules and reimbursements than small hospitals.
Likewise, one-size-fits-all structure, policies and procedures shouldn’t apply to large and small schools and districts alike. Schools with lots of students face different challenges, issues and problems than schools with fewer students.
LEARNS critics claim it will hurt public schools, which smacks of Sears-ian bureaucratic misfocus.
The primary consideration isn’t the system. The benchmark should be: Might it help students?