Why education doesn’t work — an introduction

Paying attention to what actually works in education might yield greater results than making big, audacious plans.

I was a huge fan of the book The Way Things Work by David Macaulay (Houghton-Mifflin, 1988). Macaulay’s concept was simple but incredibly insightful: Most people have absolutely no idea how or why the machines, devices, and gadgets they use and depend on every day work. Nor do they care — until something goes wrong, and then they want answers. Macaulay’s book was an attempt to provide those answers, and he did so masterfully by breaking down parts and processes to explain the mechanics behind all things ordinary and otherwise.

Macaulay’s book was the inspiration for this month’s column, which I had envisioned as a “Public Education: The Way Things Work” kind of thing. Unfortunately, as I outlined my thinking it became very clear to me that explaining how jet propulsion and seat belts work is much easier than explaining how the nation’s public education system works. Like Macaulay, I tried to break down the key parts of the system and then map out how all those parts worked together to get the “job” done — the job being to provide all students with an excellent and equitable education. That’s where I got hung up. To start, the multiple parts and players and how they interact with one another quickly became convoluted. More important, simply mapping the parts and players in the system did nothing to really explain how things work in education. Sadly, that was when I decided to change my idea to “Public Education: Why Things Don’t Work.”

Explaining how jet propulsion and seat belts work is much easier than explaining how the nation’s public education system works.

Despite the new cynical title, I don’t mean to imply that nothing in our public education system works — far from it. What I was struggling with is why so many education reform strategies — despite best intentions and plenty of resources — don’t work. A multitude of reform efforts, public and private, have focused millions of dollars and legions of experts on achieving a stated goal or scaling up a promising program. Yet, at the end of the day, in so many cases, there is little to show for all the time and resources devoted to the enterprise.

The problem begins with a fundamental misperception of how large-scale improvement happens in our nation’s public school system. The long-standing tradition of local control in the U.S. has transformed the public education system into a rather discordant quartet of governance at the federal, state, local, and school level. Each has developed its own scope of responsibility and power, but now the power tends to start with a bang at the federal level and end with a whimper at the local level. As a result, the system is often at odds with itself, and any large-scale improvement effort has to navigate multiple layers of people and power before it can take hold at the point in the system where it matters most: the school.

Well-intended efforts

I learned this lesson at a tender age back in the late 1990s when I worked for New American Schools (NAS), an organization created and funded by some of the nation’s top business leaders. Frustrated with low achievement levels, these leaders funded a select group of promising education models to see if they could bring them to scale in schools around the country and thus move the dial on student achievement. All of us who worked at NAS believed passionately in the power and potential of the models, and we assumed everyone we dealt with would feel the same way. What we didn’t understand nor plan for was the multiple layers of bureaucracy, the power struggles, the inertia, and the simmering resentment that local leaders and teachers felt about a group of outsiders who were there “to help them fix their problems.” I still cringe when I think about how naïve I was about what it takes to pull off anything at scale.

In their book, Education Governance for the 21st Century, Paul Manna and Patrick McGuinn (Brookings, 2013) remind us that “a striking feature of American governance in nearly all policy areas is federalism — the allocation of constitutional authority across federal and state governments.” Federalism has its most profound impact on education, the authors say, and I think they are exactly right. The power-sharing aspect of federalism has led to a confusing network of governance that is bursting with priorities and policies, most of which are uncoordinated and at times even contradictory.

If one of the unfortunate side effects of federalism’s impact on education is a misalignment of intent and action throughout the system, then nowhere is it more visible than in recent efforts to create a more common set of education standards (yes, the Common Core). This attempt to bring some kind of coherence to the nation’s crazy quilt world of education standards provides an excellent example of how the multiple parts of the system can, paradoxically, both drive a reform effort and try and kill it at the same time. From the beginning, this massive undertaking overtly self-identified as a state-led movement in an effort to avoid the taint of federal over-reach. Unfortunately, in a move that can only be characterized as hope versus experience, the Obama Administration incentivized states to adopt college and career standards with its Race to the Top grant competition. Fast-forward a few years later and radio host Glenn Beck is leading the charge against the standards with a “we will not conform” war cry and a two-hour town hall meeting simulcast to more than 1,000 movie theaters across the nation.

This innate distrust for all things national in education is a notion sometimes lost on education reformers who want to see everything happen at scale.

That kind of reaction, despite its extreme nature, illustrates an important point about why even the most sensible education reform strategies sometimes fail. To Beck’s followers, the idea that a group of people from outside their state and community (worse yet, Washington!) would attempt to set standards for what their children should learn in school is akin to a full frontal assault on the Constitution. They want no part of it and won’t rest until they defeat it, even if the standards themselves are spot-on in terms of what students should be learning. While there is no doubt Beck is using the standards as a tool for his own self-interest, he is sowing the seeds of discontent on fertile ground. The history of standards-based reform in the U.S. is short and not very pretty. Americans have previously stated their distaste for standardization in education, and the jury is still out on whether a state-led effort will assuage their concerns. This innate distrust for all things national in education is a notion sometimes lost on education reformers who want to see everything happen at scale.

Lack of understanding

While I understand reformers’ impatience over public education and their desire to see big change happen, that is not how things work in education. John Kotter, in his best-selling book Leading Change (Harvard Business Review Press, 1996), talks about the important difference between leadership and management and why you need both to lead change successfully. Kotter says (and I am paraphrasing here) that leadership represents the vision, and management lays the tracks and makes sure the trains run on time. This distinction is especially relevant to those trying to drive change in education. All too often, reform efforts start with an audacious vision but then grossly underestimate what’s required to move all parts of the system toward that vision. There is a fundamental lack of understanding (or willful disbelief) of how things work that leads to unrealistic expectations, bad planning, and even anger (read: high-stakes teacher evaluations). To really explain how things work in education, just study the leadership and management plans that undergird schools and districts that are actually changing. They may not be doing anything audacious, but what they are doing is clearly working.

CITATION: Ferguson, M. (2014). WASHINGTON VIEW: Why education doesn’t work — an introduction. Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (2), 74-75.