The Chalkboard Project's Thinking Box

It's time to be more precise about this thing I call the thinking box. The challenge for the Chalkboard Project is to understand why the design of the government system of providing educational services resists change. To the extent minor reforms cover up and put off discussion of the basic system design and its inequitable consequences for the massive educational underclass, its efforts boarder on being immoral.

One of the things the design of our system of government schools does is to send a huge stream of public money, over $5 billion, from the state school fund to the districts. It is going to an educational bureaucracy (I mean simply a government-owned organization designed to be centrally controlled at the top and implemented at the lower levels by government employees). Public achooling is organized as a classic form of government bureaucracy. The huge bureaucracy that teaches and administers depends on the revenue stream from the state. Their memberships in the big education organizations are devoted to preserving and making this system work. Improvements and minsor changes to make this system work better are tolerated and sometimes even valued but always fundamental is to protect the basic design of this system. The system design places public education services under government control and this government box defines and restricts what is possible in all the subsequent reform processes.

Under a bureaucratic system, there is no freedom allowed to enter this sector by other providers. The districts are the exclusive providers of public education. Educators who have everything to lose and little to gain have powerful incentives to protect their livelihood by preserving this basic design. So who would change it? Perhaps some disinterested outside party but the likelihood of some non-governmental organization having the will and resources to take on the problem of system design is small simply because the system is huge and most people who know anything about its complexities are those who work inside the system and who have a vested interest in seeing that it doesn’t change; the system by design is a legal revenue stream imposed by state law that provides the beneficiaries with direct and guaranteed source of jobs, salaries, and benefits.

In short, it is government that excludes any other providers from having direct access to the state school fund. And quite naturally protecting this government control is crucial to those who depend on this design. In the legislative battle over a charter bill, the OSBA lobbyist said, "We will never allow anyone else other than school districts to have access to the state school fund." They would allow a charter bill only if charter schools were financially kept under the control of districts, and that’s is what the legislature delivered. At the time, the legislature simply didn’t have the will or political muscle to overcome the vested interests of the big education organizations.

The result of public schools being protected by the legislature’s legal framework in which it created the exclusive power of districts to provide all public education services has a devastating consequence for the kids. The schools are protected from having to change and improve because the incentives, the rewards, don’t depend on kids learning. Revenues are guaranteed whether the kids learn or not. If some kids, in fact, if most kids fail to thrive and learn, it has no consequence for the adults who run the system. About 1/3 of the 3/4 of the students who make it through to graduation make it to the level of the 10th grade CIM standard, and this massive failure of government schools remains a relatively constant condition over the decades. Failure has no consequence. In fact, schools may even get more money to correct failings.

This isolation from performance means "reforms" don’t much affect the level of performance because what can be changed in such a protected system are largely trivial reforms that are acceptable to the system. It means that these minor reforms won’t much matter for the kids; the adults will allow minor changes within the system as long as the system design that creates the exclusive power by government school districts to be the sole provider of public education services remains in place.

And because public education services are free and open to all, this structurally rigid system also creates a structurally rigid class of educational haves and have nots. We wouldn’t have an achievement gap problem except that we have universal public education that is supposed to be equitable. Kids differ. Differences in performance will appear. But it’s not differences per se that makes the system inequitable. It is its rigidity, its lack of possible educational mobility available to kids. The system prevents possibilities for low end students to be better served. Low students have little opportunity for something better suited to their needs. We wouldn’t have a rigid class of educational have nots except that we have a rigid government controlled single provider system. Centralized government control does that to a society. It is immoral to the degree it shuts down opportunity for people to innovate and create new methods for delivering education.

The idea of opportunity versus government control is generally true. Free societies do, of course, create poverty so to speak simply by contrast with the rich but poverty in a free society is not a rigid class imposed on individuals; it is not a rigid condition. In a free society individuals have income mobility unrestricted by government and dependent only on individuals’ work and constructive activity.

Public education is different. For students who cannot afford private schooling, there is almost no educational mobility. Immediately upon entering kindergarten, students quickly sort into rigid classes of educational haves and educational have nots due to a single age graded standardized method of educational delivery that makes almost no accommodation to individual intellectual differences. Students who are mismatched with the instructional program at first grade and to the intellectual progression of instruction in primary school will be mismatched throughout their school careers. The correlation between entering level at first grade and performance at graduation is startlingly high. Their status as an educational have not will remain constant up through graduation if they make it that far. Their low grades correlate with being at risk of dropping out. They simply don’t fit to the system. Even though failure to learn and thrive is immediately apparent among some students, the system does not change or accommodate its basic design to the needs of students. It sorts kids by age, not need.

The public school system is a rigid and unforgiving system of instruction because delivery is based on sorting kids by age and moves along them along year by year regardless of whether they are learning or not. The people running the system aren’t bad. It’s the system design that causes the problem. The system provides educational services without regard to students because the system is designed to pay the districts to provide educational services, not learning. The incentives—salaries, jobs, benefits—have no connection with kids’ learning. The incentives aren’t aligned with the mission. We simply don’t pay for what we want. We pay to have a bureaucratic system, not learning. Of course such as system creates a rigid class structure of haves and have nots. By design, change by individuals or organizations is not allowed.

The general principle is: Freedom is required for there to be healthy constructive efforts and intelligent problem solving.
Nathan Rosenberg, and L.E., Jr. Birdzell state this principle, that change requires freedom, in their book How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. "Growth is, of course, a form of change, and growth is impossible when change is not permitted. And successful change requires a large measure of freedom to experiment. A grant of that kind of freedom costs a society's rulers their feeling of control... The great majority of societies, past and present, have not allowed it. Nor have they escaped from poverty." The public education system has la low measure of freedom. Low students cannot escape their intellectual poverty because our state does not yet allow the kind of freedom necessary to change and development. Those who now have control simply have no good reason to give up their control.

The lack of freedom in the system means that because of the exclusive, protected status of the districts, reforms which attempt to make schools improve never work very effectively if at all. Depending on the studies’ designs, reforms like reducing class size or increasing teacher standards or increasing funding show miniscule or no correlation at all with student performance, and sometimes even negative correlations. Outsiders, even the legislature, don’t’ own the schools and put simply, don’t run the schools. Even if there is some good thing we want schools to do, what can be imposed can only be done by legal mandate and because those things must be carefully specified to be imposed, they tend to be simplistic and trivial things that end up having little direct connection with the actual educational activities of students, particularly those who are struggling to learn.

If there is to be real change and significant improvement, there must be redesign of the system fundamentals, the arrangement that gives exclusive control to districts. Who can do this? The government school system is huge; it consumes half the state budget; it has a long history of complications and refinements that increase its controls; it reaches every square inch of the state; and it has many big education organizations whose powers come from having obtained legal entitlements to dues, fees, memberships, and mandatory bargaining locked in place by law. It is a government system. It is centrally controlled. It is coercive. And it will oppose anyone or any organization who dares attempt to change it.

That idea of a design based on giving exclusive power to a single district organization inside a geographic boundary is the thinking box of reform talk. The box is not discussed, only the reforms. Reforms are small, politically easy. System redesign is huge, politically challenging.

The problem with good intentioned efforts to reform schools, like the Chalkboard Project, is that reforms serve as Band-Aids that prevent an honest discussion of the important issue of system design, and by doing so, deflect serious change in system design. Reforms usually involve all the stakeholders and they often attempt widespread citizen participation to give them legitimacy but these processes serve only to continue the myths upon which the current design depends.

Organizations working for education reforms are the enablers that serve to maintain the existing system design by keeping the system going in the face of its massive and consistent failure to serve all kids. Doing minor reforms covers up the underlying system design problem and to that extent, they are disingenuous, misleading, and immoral.