Welcome to The Doyle Report blog!

By now most people understand that the economic revolution that followed the Second World War represented not more of the same, but less of the same, not working harder but working smarter. Human capital – what people know and can do – replaced physical capital as the source of most wealth and virtually all economic growth. Not long ago the very idea of human capital was so novel it won a Nobel Prize (1992) for its most ardent exponent, University of Chicago economist Gary Becker.

True, what some ”people knew and were able to do” had always been important — oil was simply a sticky black ooze until someone figured out that it could be used as fuel in a controlled burn. Enter the internal combustion engine (shouldering aside the external combustion engine) and the rest was history.

What is qualitatively different today is the centrality of human capital and the need to diffuse it widely, both among suppliers and consumers. According to the Economist, when the automobile came into production on a fairly large scale – at the beginning of the last century – a confident prediction was offered: it would never catch on because there were not enough people of high enough intelligence to be trained as chauffeurs!

So much for predictions.

Indeed, physical capital – things – have always interacted with human capital, the skills, knowledge and capacities of the people the use them. Early in human history, intelligent design became a priority. Which is to say, human designers had to conceive and execute in ways that were simple and effective, whether the thing at hand was an arrow-head or an automobile transmission.

Indeed, the real barrier to wide-spread diffusion of the automobile was not lack of intelligence, but lack of physical strength. The hand-cranking needed to start a car required enormous strength (and some courage as the crank had to disengage from the crank shaft at the precise moment the engine caught; otherwise the crack would catch you). Kettering’s invention in 1911 of the self-starter was the breakthrough that made the automotive revolution possible.

As this and countless other examples demonstrate, there is a human capital physical capital symbiosis – it is no accident that we humans are descended from homo habilis “tool user” (or to use the discoverer Leakey’s name, “handy man”).

What does this have to do with education and technology? Just as there has been a qualitative transformation in the role of human capital, there has been a qualitative transformation in the nature of physical capital. Just as human capital embodies more intelligence so too does physical capital. (Old fashioned physical capital, a hammer and nails, for example, embodied intelligence, “upstream” in its design and production and “downstream” in its use).

Indeed, it is at the point of intersection between human and physical capital that the fun – and astonishing opportunities — begin. In the work place this is revealed in the economist’s distinction, making it or buying it. A firm (or hospital or school) has two basic choices: it can hire people who are already human capital rich (educated and trained) or do the training themselves. Or more realistically, a mix of the two: as former Xerox CEO and Deputy Secretary of Education David Kearns famously said, “If the schools educate, business will train…”

Enter PD (professional development). Its explicit purpose should be to make average teachers good teachers and good teachers better. The means there must be a clear understanding of the school’s mission and a clear understanding of the teacher and administrator’s knowledge and skills. And there must be explicit and readily available metrics to measure accomplishment. Is knowledge about parallel lines, Huckleberry Finn or Latin verbs lines something that students are expected to demonstrate? How do you know what they know?

Truth be told, much PD is vapid, poorly focused and poorly understood. Stories abound about PD activities that are boring at best, wasteful at worst. But conceived of in an ROI (return on investment) atmosphere PD can make the key difference in teaching and learning. In the private sector it more than pays for itself in increased productivity, greater output. It should do no less in schools.

At its best, properly designed PD/IT (professional development information technology) can do several things at once – it can, for example, track teacher, administrator and student knowledge and skills while it delivers the missing content pieces to the right person at the right time. It can do so at very high speed, at reasonable cost in a user-friendly (and user-useful) environment and format. All the while increasing academic achievement. That’s hard to improve on.

Michelle A. Rhee (CEO of the New Teacher Project), who I had the pleasure of interviewing last week (with her opposite number, Jonathan Schnur CEO of New Leaders for New Schools), knows how to keep a secret, a trait that will stand her in good stead in her new incarnation as Chancellor of the DC school system. (During a one hour presentation before nearly 200 education reformers at EduStat 2007 Michelle said nary a word about her new job.)

(The interview should be posted shortly -- I'll post the link when it is available.)

Announced two days ago by Mayor Adrian Fenty, Michelle's appointment is part of two trends. The first is mayoral control of schools; the second is appointing "uncredentialed" or "unlicensed" leaders to fill the post of superintendent (or in the case of DC and NYC, chancellor).

The nightmare of credentialing is ordinarily thought of in terms of teachers, a challenge that reformers like Michelle and Wendy Kopp have taken on in their respective spheres; in their earliest incarnation, credentials were meant to be a floor beneath which teachers would not fall. In their modern incarnation they have become a ceiling through which they may not pass. For example, the head of the Sidwell Friends math program, a trained mathematician with 30 years experience of superlative high school teaching couldn't get a job in a public school. Nor could Einstein.

By way of contrast, the most ordinary time-server could muddle through a college of teacher education and "earn" a credential. So too administrative credentials. Most important, the credentialitis that afflicts public K-12 education, while originally well intentioned, is not linked to performance.

So, onward and upward Michelle: you carry a dual burden and the eyes of the nation are on you. First, to redeem the DC schools which have nowhere to go but up and second to offer living proof of Mayor Fenty's vision that the right person for the job is more important than the right credential. Good luck and God speed.

Denis P. Doyle

From the beginning, nearly a decade ago now, a mantra became the center piece of SchoolNet corporate philosophy: the technology is easy, the culture is hard. As a statement of fact that still rings true, it reveals as much about the technology of school improvement as it reveals about schools as institutions. Interestingly, it rings truer yet for WEB 2.0.

To those of us used to numerical release integers on software (with decimals to denote minor fixes and fine tuning), WEB 2.0 sounds like a major technical transformation. It is not. Indeed, it is more important for that, because it speaks to a spontaneous cultural transformation, one that has been possible all along using existing technology. True, technology plays a role, but it is a “more of the same role” in the case of WEB 2.0 – more bandwidth, speed and storage capacity, not qualitative software changes.

More to the point, the need for new terminology -- WEB 2.0 -- reflects a maturation of the WEB (the silliness of www.youtube.com or www.myface.com to the contrary notwithstanding). Kids exchanging videos are the proverbial tip of the ice berg. As longshoreman - philosopher Eric Hoffer pointed out more than fifty years ago - when he was mulling over the fact that the wheel was a toy before it was a tool - serious work has its origins in play. And almost alone in the animal kingdom, humans retain the capacity for play well into adulthood.

The NEA’s greatest triumph was taking the “E” out of HEW; a
campaign promise of Jimmy Carter’s, he quickly delivered (before the national “malaise”
that later cost him his presidency set in).
The question I want to pose is whether it was worth the candle or should
Education be more closely tied to health and welfare than it currently is? Should
we cut our losses and breath life back into a new, reconstituted HEW?

Or put slightly differently, should there be a national
children’s policy, knitting together – in one place – the strands of a unified human
capital strategy?

The hard fact is this – education attainment correlates so
strongly with race, ethnicity and income that the question cannot be avoided:
do we need integrated children’s services or can schools continue to go it alone?

You Tube and Wikipedia have been in the news lately: are they an omen of what’s to come or simply a phase? Both, most likely. You Tube, selected as Time’s Invention of the year in 2006 (and acquired by Google for $1.65 billion) is simply too big to dismiss yet too juvenile to think that it will last unchanged. (See for yourself at www.youtube.com). But as gross and revealing as You Tube postings can be at their worst, on balance they speak to a desire – a need, perhaps — to communicate that the world wide web is uniquely well suited to satisfy.

Among other things, the WEB is the most radically democratic (with a small “d”) development since the Greek City State. No site makes this point more powerfully than Wikipedia, a do-it-yourself on-line “free” encyclopedia founded in 2001 and now the 10th most visited web site. (See.www.wikipedia.org).

What might a more focused version look like? One that revolves around schooling, formal and informal. Schooling is the one enterprise we all have in common and it consumes our early and middle years, from student through parenthood (into grandparenthood!). Consider the numbers: on the student side of the ledger there are 4 – 8 million preschoolers (depending on what age you chose); 55 million K-12 students, each with a parent or guardian; and12-15 million post secondary students. And the numbers keep rolling along, year after year.

On the supply side it’s big business too: the nation’s 14,500 school districts are overseen by 80,000 school board members and each has a superintendent; collectively they employ more than five million teachers, administrators and classified employees (ranging from statisticians to crossing guards, from CIO’s to cooks, from nurses to gardeners. Indeed, the modern school district of any size looks like nothing so much as a single purpose city-state.)

You get the picture; it’s a huge market waiting for an integrating theme or set of themes.

But it’s much more than a commercial market – it is a cultural commons where people meet and confer, share hopes and dreams, disappointments and thrills. You don’t need to be a Friday Night Lights fan to know that after school sports are the cement that binds many local communities together. And you don’t have to be a cultural anthropologist to know that school is the source of deep and lasting friendships, not just among students, but among their parents (who meet through their own students).

The Little Red School House of myth, then, lives on in the modern world, where the school is the center of community and social life. True, school ties may be stronger in the early grades, but that is where they are formed in the first instance (and where students are less likely to be embarrassed by mom and dad being around.) And if high school attracts less parental attention, colleges and universities often attract more, with homecoming events simply the tip of the ice berg.

Given these facts, one would expect schools to be taking the lead in emphasizing the importance of communication. To be sure, all schools think that one-way, outward-facing communication is important: schools make an effort to reach their parent communities and their community elites. After all, board members face the voters on a regular basis and tax rates are the subject of concern across the country. As a consequence, rare is the Superintendent who fails to participate in Rotary (and Rotary-like) events. The old bromide contains a scintilla of truth: the successful superintend is uncomfortable because he has his nose to the grindstone, his eye on the horizon and his ear to the ground. But that’s a low tech posture, to say the least.

Rarer still, however, is the Superintendent who goes the extra mile and encourages two-way communication in which community views are solicited earnestly and thoroughly. The reasons are not hard to fathom – for starters, two-way communication is twice as much work as one-way; more to the point, the superintendent possesses expert knowledge denied the rank and file. He doesn’t need their advice. Or so it appears. And these issues are compounded by district size – the bigger the district, the more diverse and vocal the factions.

But as You Tube and Wikipedia reveal (and as WEB 2.0 is about to further reveal) like it or not the old order — characterized by top-down communication — is on its way out. What’s on its way in? According to the “inventor of the world wide web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium” Tim Bernes-Lee’s the Semantic Web is the wave of the future. More on that in another column. (See www.w3.org).

A little noted question continues to interest me – How do private schools get away with paying lower salaries than public schools? There are a multitude of small answers – religious order members take vows of poverty, but their numbers are few and shrinking; uncredentialed teachers can’t get hired in the public sector, but temporary credentials are easy to get in many jurisdictions; private school teachers are not unionized, but it’s not clear that unionization forces salaries up by much.

The larger answer in my mind is what economists call “psychic” income; as distinct from “real” income, “psychic” income is the product of a sense of personal and professional efficacy and satisfaction, rarely found in large bureaucracies. Indeed, large bureaucracies specialize in what I called in an earlier piece “institutionalizing the suspension of judgment” which is to say the least, hostile to professionalism.

The fact of lower pay in private schools is all the more interesting in light of practices in the other learned professions – law, medicine, architecture, engineering, accounting – in which pay is considerably higher in the private than the public sector. Indeed, the role reversal is nearly complete, the advantage of “psychic” income enjoyed by the public sector. Think of the salary cut taken by judges.

From the beginning, nearly a decade ago now, a mantra became the center piece of SchoolNet corporate philosophy: the technology is easy, the culture is hard. As a statement of fact that still rings true, it reveals as much about the technology of school improvement as it reveals about schools as institutions. Interestingly, it rings truer yet for WEB 2.0.

To those of us used to numerical release integers on software (with decimals to denote minor fixes and fine tuning), WEB 2.0 sounds like a major technical transformation. It is not. Indeed, it is more important for that, because it speaks to a spontaneous cultural transformation, one that has been possible all along using existing technology. True, technology plays a role, but it is a “more of the same role” in the case of WEB 2.0 – more bandwidth, speed and storage capacity, not qualitative software changes.

One of the aspects of the WEB that is routinely touted is its democratic character (with a small “d”). But as in other matters, the sword is double-edged. That the WEB is democratic not only means that it is open, transparent and egalitarian; it means that ideas, activities and direction percolate up from the bottom, not just down from the top. (To be sure, early adopters and “alpha geeks” play the role of pacesetters but to use the language of political theory, their authority is moral not physical, exemplary not dictatorial. They can’t tell us what to do and WEB users are notoriously independent, positively allergic to authoritarian wanna-bees).

A perfect example is the debate that is presently being waged about “civility” on the WEB and ways to see that it is protected. One thing unites WEB-users, however: opposition to government controls over WEB content. Characteristically, WEB-users are proposing a voluntary code-of-conduct; or more precisely, voluntary codes of conduct, reflecting tiers of civility as it were. So too, Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia, is engaged in discussions about accuracy and polemical and ideological entries. How it resolves itself remains to me seen, but one would hope on the side of accuracy and fidelity to the facts, not propaganda.

What distinguishes WEB 2.0 from 1.0? As in Shakespeare’s image, not much, at least technically: a rose by any other name. The distinguishing characteristic is interactivity as distinct from passivity, the aforementioned Wikipedia being a prime example. The original encyclopedist of the modern era – Denis Diderot the French Enlightenment philosophe, for example – acted on a vision of assembling and printing the definitive compendium of human knowledge in what we would come to call hard-copy. As remarkable as it was, it was static, and fixed in time and place. (Later, when encyclopedias became house-hold fixtures, year-books were introduced to keep up with the pace of knowledge).

WEB 2.0, then, is outward-facing and dynamic, transparent and democratic, mass rather than elite. It goes well beyond e-mail and IM, including on-line communities, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies. (You might wonder what a folksonomy is: according to Wikipedia “a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts as well. The process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time).”

A coinage of Tim O’Reilly’s in 2004 (of O’Reilly Media) WEB 2.0 as most IT fans know by now is the subject of intense interest and heated colloquy (see the Wikipedia entry for a taste of the debate). One thing is certain, however, win, lose or draw it will not go away.

More to the point, the need for new terminology — WEB 2.0 — reflects a maturation of the WEB (the silliness of www.youtube.com or www.myface.com to the contrary notwithstanding). Kids exchanging videos are the proverbial tip of the ice berg. As longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer pointed out more than fifty years ago – when he was mulling over the fact that the wheel was a toy before it was a tool — serious work has its origins in play. And almost alone in the animal kingdom, humans retain the capacity for play well into adulthood.

Denis P. Doyle
April 11, 2007

Friends, colleagues and countrymen: lend me your eyes. The fourth annual EduStat 2007, co-hosted by SchoolNet and Teachers College, is about to begin; the physical event will be held at Columbia University’s Lerner Hall June 6, 7 and 8, 2007. (It’s not too late to register! See the registration button.) And the virtual event begins with this blog’s launch Monday, April 30, 2007.

Our theme this year is Teacher 2.0, a play on the emerging debate about Web 2.0. As I noted in a recent View Point in The Doyle Report, what distinguishes Web 2.0 from 1.0? As in Shakespeare’s image, not much, at least technically: a rose by any other name. The distinguishing characteristic is interactivity as distinct from passivity …Wikipedia being a prime example. The original encyclopedist of the modern era – Denis Diderot the French Enlightenment philosophe, for example – acted on a vision of assembling and printing the definitive compendium of human knowledge in what we would come to call hardcopy. As remarkable as it was, it was static and fixed in time and place. (Later, when encyclopedias became household fixtures, year-books were introduced to keep up with the pace of knowledge).

Web 2.0, then, is outward-facing and dynamic, transparent and democratic, mass rather than elite. It goes well beyond email and IM, including online communities, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies. (You might wonder what a folksonomy is: according to Wikipedia “a folksonomy is a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve Web pages, photographs, Web links and other web content using open ended labels called tags. Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, but their use may occur in other contexts as well. The process of folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time).”

A coinage of Tim O’Reilly’s (of O’Reilly Media) in 2004 Web 2.0 as most IT fans know by now is the subject of intense interest and heated colloquy (see the Wikipedia entry for a taste of the debate). One thing is certain, however, win, lose or draw it will not go away.

More to the point, the need for new terminology reflects a maturation of the Web. Kids exchanging videos are the proverbial tip of the ice berg. As longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer pointed out more than fifty years ago – when he was mulling over the fact that the wheel was a toy before it was a tool – serious work has its origins in play. And almost alone in the animal kingdom, humans retain the capacity for play well into adulthood.

What is true of Web 2.0 will be true of Teacher 2.0 – dynamic, outward facing, community building, radically democratic, initiatory, active and interventionist; how the Web is changing is how teaching will change.

We are fortunate to have as keynoters for EduStat 2007 UFT President Randi Weingarten (Thursday June 7) and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (Friday June 8); both will speak to their vision of the future of teaching; in the immediate future, no two education leaders will have a greater influence on the craft of teaching. Indeed, Teacher 2.0 will emerge from the interplay between these two actors on the education stage.

With this blog and the EduStat Web site, then — www.edustat.com – we offer a virtual EduStat, both to stimulate discussion before the event and to act as a continuing forum during and after the event. It will be graced by distinguished contributors (listed here) and the interaction of readers like you across the nation and around the world. We look forward to your comments and contributions to this discussion – one that we hope to be even livelier and more consequential than the debate about the future of the Web.

Denis P. Doyle
CAO, SchoolNet
April 30, 2007

The good news about Title I is that it still exists – the bad news is its track record. Created by ESEA in 1965, its purpose and promise were noble, its accomplishments underwhelming. Launched by President Johnson as the center piece of his Great Society more than 40 years ago, its grand purpose was a first step to lift the poor out of poverty. Education – good education – would be the great equalizer. Would that it were so.

Created as a categorical – a special purpose program – it was designed to improve the English and math performance of poor children. Often viewed as an urban program for black youngsters, in point of fact Title I served more poor whites than blacks because their sheer numbers were greater. As a categorical, Title I’s original authorization contained a “supplement not supplant” provision, designed to make sure that Title I would begin as an add-on – and stay that way. No general revenue sharing by Washington.

But there is many a slip t’wixt cup and lip, and in some respects Title I looks suspiciously like general revenue sharing in education. Why? Because federal oversight is uneven and weak, recipient school districts are virtually left to their own devices. Although funding for Title I is not great by federal standards, as targeted aid it can make a real difference to recipients. And the vast majority of the nation’s 14,500 school districts receive Title I funds. Weak outcomes to the contrary notwithstanding, it is no wonder Title I is popular among educators and on the Hill.

In an era of accountability and value-added assessment, however, it’s time for a radical overhaul: in the sprit of NCLB, tie downstream Title I funding to measured accomplishment, gains over time. Because of the remarkable bipartisan support NCLB enjoyed for the first time there is significant pressure from the national government to improve student performance. Additional funding can deliver the goods. In particular, as the name of the Act suggests, all students are expected to demonstrate increased academic performance.

No child will be left behind is the language of the statute and the moral imperative that drove its enactment. In this spirit, the adage “every child can learn” had become the mantra of education reform. It falls to the implementers of NCLB to make that a reality: “every child will learn.” It is a long step, however, from pious homilies to delivery. Successful implementation of NCLB requires prodigies of effort and two major changes in the way schools conduct their affairs.

First and most important is a cultural change – schools and the men and women who work in them must develop an unshakable determination to succeed and be prepared to measure and report on their efforts, their disappointments and their successes. Second, schools must adopt modern information technology – IT – to accomplish these objectives. While not a sufficient condition for successful implementation, modern IT is a necessary condition. It is simply not possible to achieve the grand goals of Title I improvement without extensive and intensive use of IT.

The requirements of NCLB make modern IT essential – the data sets that emerge from a commitment to tracking disaggregated academic performance information require, at minimum, data warehousing capabilities, as well as decision support and reporting tools. And because the business of public education is the business of the public, the data necessary to measure performance must be reported to the public in a language the public understands. Any IT solution to Title I must include as a major component a thoughtful community engagement tool. At minimum, four data collection, management, analysis and reporting requirements clearly emerge:

• Data warehousing and decision support tools;
  
• Instructional alignment tools;
  
• Community engagement tools; and.
  
• On-line assessment tools.
  
  
  We should make it clear that these purposes are not punitive; academic performance data is important not to hold schools and educators up to public obloquy and ridicule but to give educators the tools to improve performance and increase their sense of professional efficacy. No one wants to be a bad teacher just as no one wants to be a bad lawyer or doctor. Properly designed incentives and rewards – backed by modern IT – lay the foundation for lasting improvements in teaching and learning. Title I’s strength should be its ability to transform problems into opportunities and to encourage the celebration of success.

Denis Doyle
April 20, 2007

The case for national standards is so self-evidently powerful that I am always surprised that it has to be made. Indeed, for years I have expected national standards to emerge spontaneously, with state after state seeing the wisdom of pooling resources rather than re-inventing standards 50 times over. After all, America is rich and powerful because we are a democratic, continental common market with a shared language and civic and popular culture. With these traits aligned could national standards be far behind?

Oddly enough, the answer is “yes,” they have been and continue to be far behind. But perhaps not forever. The Council of the Great City Schools – an association of 66 of the nation’s urban districts – has endorsed the idea as have selected think tanks like the Fordham Foundation. Equally important, some of the nation’s premier superintendents are calling for national standards (see Ed Week, vol. 26, no. 26, March 7, 2007, The Case for National Standards in American Education, Rudy Crew, Paul Vallas and Michael Casserly). Times they are a changin’.

The principle reason – and the principled reason -- opponents have rejected the idea of national standards is to preserve local control. Such a slender reed on which to lean, reminding me of nothing so much as Janis Joplin’s Saturday Night Swindle: “freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose…”

The issue, insofar as there may be merit in it, is whether or not national standards should be mandatory or exemplary. I see no contest. National standards need not be mandatory – indeed law is an inadequate device to model behavior – but voluntary. So long as assessments of standards mastery are transparent, open to independent analysis and not voluntary. That is the British model, one we could profitably emulate.

Indeed, it is a model we already deploy in the field of public health in which reporting is mandatory, compliance is voluntary. Thus if a cholera epidemic breaks out in a coastal city all that United States Public Health Service requires is that it be reported; the local folks have ample incentive can solicit help if they need to, but they don’t have to be told – by fiat – to stamp out cholera. They have the wit to do it on their own.

So too with education standards. In-voluntary assessments would mean that voluntary compliance with a national standards regime would be expected and would become the rule. And in those communities where the national standards were viewed as inappropriate (too low, perhaps) they could be ignored so long as national assessments revealed that they were meeting them on their own. Alternately, they could forfeit federal aid. (Reconciling freedom and necessity as Nietzsche had it.)

Any other course of action is foolhardy, or to use the appropriate British chestnut, penny-wise and pound-foolish.

And those that doubt the efficacy -- and realism -- of voluntary national standards together with in-voluntary assessments need look no further than E. D. “Don Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools. As reported in the current issue of his blog by self-confessed education policy wonk Andy Rotherham (member of the Virginia State Board of Education and publisher of Eduwonk at www.eduwonk.org) Hirsh’s schools do not teach to the test yet they do very well on state required exams. Evidence – if it were needed -- that a good education – with a solid core curriculum – is the best way to assure a high score on mandated examinations.

Denis P. Doyle
April 6, 2007

Oprah Winfrey, already an entertainment legend in her own time, has firmly established her place in education history with a remarkable bit of philanthropy, the creation of all girls Leadership Academy in South Africa. (See Building a Dream at www2.oprah.com). On her ABC prime time special February 26, 2007 she described the school’s opening as the “proudest day in her life.”

A “free,” highly selective, private boarding school for girls (nearly 4,000 applicants for 400 seats) its name speaks volumes: Leadership Academy. The school will enroll among the most highly motivated and talented young women in South Africa. Such a school is rewarding in proportion as it is demanding.

By creating such an institution Oprah may be doing even more than she realizes. Not only is she transforming policy and practice in South Africa, she may be changing the very terms of the education improvement debate in this country as well. The only criticism I’ve heard about her dramatic philanthropy is “why not do it at home?” Why not indeed?

For generations – since LBJ’s Great Society -- the clarion call of education reformers has been to serve the neediest not the most ambitious. Indeed, the worst epithet that could be hurled at an education reformer – worse than ageist, or sexist, or even racist – was elitist. Oprah, by going offshore with her philanthropy has escaped the charge but it cannot be far behind.

The logic of Oprah’s Leadership Academy is inescapable – a “free” highly selective school is like the proverbial perpetual motion machine, harnessing energy simultaneously from both ends of the education see-saw, students and teachers. It is a dream environment in which to teach and to study. The rewards for participating – both for teachers and students -- are rich and numerous and the penalty for failing to participate fully is a self-inflicted wound. For every drop-out (if there are any at all) there are ten candidates waiting in line.

If Oprah’s South Africa project succeeds – as there is every reason to believe it will – can a similar set of schools in US cities be far behind? What might they look like? Imagine an Oprah Leadership Academy for girls in every big city in the US. Imagine an Oprah Leadership Academy for boys in every big city in the US. Imagine an Oprah Leadership Academy for boys and girls in every big city in the US. Imagine such schools as both day-schools and boarding schools. And imagine them as self-replicating institutions so long as demand to enroll is strong. Start with one Leadership Academy in Oprah’s home town (and mine, Chicago) and add one a year till the demand is satisfied.

If Oprah were willing to lend her considerable talent to such an undertaking, the idea would not be altogether far-fetched but it would still be swimming up-stream. It would fly in the face of fifty years of egalitarian social policy, in which access and equity rather than excellence has been the issue. But it does have a history. Boston Latin, Peter Stuyvesant in Manhattan, Bronx School of Science, Philadelphia’s Central High (known locally as Boys High), Philadelphia’s Girls High, and San Francisco’s Lowell High School are living examples of demanding, selective public schools.

But they’ve all had to fight for their institutional lives. Most pertinent to Oprah’s Academy on the home front is Washington DC’s Dunbar High, once an elite “magnet” school (before that term was coined) for the best and the brightest of black Washington in the days before Brown v Board of Education. In response to Brown the benighted DC School Board of the day turned Dunbar into a neighborhood school to keep it segregated!

It would take someone of Oprah’s stature to breath life into Leadership Academies American style but it would be a task well worth undertaking.

Denis P. Doyle
March 9, 2007

Another doom’s day report has hit the street, this one just released by Educational Testing Service titled America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future (see www.ets.org). (The other is the report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, Tough Choices or Tough Times See www.skillscommission.org ).

First of all, can you trust an organization which calls itself Educational (rather than Education) Testing Service? Like a trick vocabulary question it makes me uncomfortable. After all, all testing is educational, but the testing of interest to education reformers is education testing, is it not? Be that as it may, ETS has joined the parade of purveyors of bad economic news flowing from and caused by bad education news.

Educational, to be sure, but is it valid? I ask the question with some trepidation because I have made my reputation -- such as it is -- trumpeting the same kind of news. As the project director for CED’s pathbreaking study Investing in Our Children: Business and the Schools in 1985 I joined the chorus predicting economic disaster if our schools didn’t improve. They didn’t, at least by much; neither did the economy crash.

And I had the good fortune to co-author with Xerox Chairman and CEO David T. Kearns, Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive followed by Reinventing Education coauthored with Lou Gerstner et al (then CEO of RJR Nabisco, soon to become CEO of IBM). In both books we made the case that economic disaster awaited us if we failed to improve our schools and improve them radically.

Something funny happened on the way to economic disaster, however. It didn’t occur. The same thing, I might add, happened to Malthus and his theory that population growth would outstrip food supplies leading to wholesale famine. He opined that because population grows geometrically and food supply grows arithmetically a fatal imbalance would occur. So far – for two hundred years – he’s been wrong. (Doubly wrong as it were; famines have stalked the land in China, Russia and parts of Africa, but not for lack of technology and know-how, but because of ideology. Markets, when they are permitted to work, have prevented famine (with a powerful helping hand from research and development.)

This is not to suggest that Malthus’ math was wrong, he simply misjudged the size, speed and magnitude of the technical fixes that would become available in the future. Indeed, the ultimate irony is that one of the enduring problems of the developed world is what to do with vast agricultural surpluses, an eventuality that would have left Malthus reeling.

Is there a similar error in the doomsdayer’s forecast about education failure as a stalking horse for economic failure? There must be, but putting a finger on it is tricky. For example, it would be foolhardy to argue with ETS’s first force when it asserts that “economic restructuring is placing a premium on education and skills;” the evidence in terms of income effects is simply overwhelming (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer). So too its second force, “inadequate skill levels are narrowing individuals’ opportunities…” Less so its third force, “undereducated, underskilled immigrants are driving population growth.”

Put slightly differently, are markets failing to signal changes in demand and opportunity? Don’t prospective workers know what skills will be in high demand? They may not…but two unexamined variables stand out.

First is what a French economist acquaintance calls flexibilité, the remarkable flexibility that characterizes the American economy (with the notable exception of elementary and secondary education which is as rule-bound as any European industry). By flexibilité is meant freedom from work rules (not to be confused with freedom from unions) which permits people to “work out of classification” or work in a deliberately broadened classification. For example, an experienced surveyor may work as an engineer, a physician’s assistant work as a physician, a software designer gains a reputation on the basis of performance not credentials. And so on.

The other variable, to use an old-fashioned term of art, is work ethic, the single most important aspect of human capital, and the aspect that most sharply characterizes American immigrants. They are hungry for work and know that hard work pays off, not just in terms of income, but in cultural terms. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this phenomenon, particularly in a global context. Almost alone among nations, a hard working immigrant in America can not only enter the middle class, he or she can become an American!

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 7.7, No. 187
February 12, 2007

The term “cultural competence” is in the air, as it should be in a society as diverse and varied as ours. But what does it mean, that turn of art? For starters, it is the opposite of xenophobia, fear of foreigners. Beyond that it is hard to tell. In part because the term is new, in part because it means different things to different people.

That the term is only dimly understood is appropriate given the novelty of our circumstances. There is something in it for everyone. (A quick WEB crawl suggests that the term is about ten years old, first surfacing in the medical community, then migrating to education.)

It was brought to my attention at a recent meeting of WABE (Washington Area Boards of Education) to which I was invited. The meeting included two dozen Washington DC area school officials gathering informally to discuss a topic of interest. Of great interest to me – greater at first than the subject of the meeting -- was the meeting itself, drawing on school board members, senior administrators, a few friends and experts. Everyone in attendance was a former teacher (or so it seemed) and everyone was deeply interested in the subject at hand. What was most striking was their interest in and willingness to share experiences, both what was unique and what they had in common.

And what they had in common was demographic change, a virtual flood of newcomers from around the globe. To them the issue of cultural competence was not an abstraction, but a daily reality. And to my relief, cultural competence was not cast in terms of touchy-feely, feel good issues. To the contrary, cultural competence was cast as a hard-edged way to increase academic achievement.

Charles Wilson, for example, kicked things off with comments about a large, low-spending Virginia district with a substantial minority enrollment (Norfolk) that did well on the SOL tests (standards of learning). Why? According to Charles, because of culturally competent leadership.

For what it’s worth, my take on cultural competence – at least at this point in time – is cautious, narrow and measurable. The example that makes the most sense to me is language acquisition. Indeed, in no activity is culture more deeply embedded than language and few competencies can be more directly measured than language mastery. For example, the US Foreign Service Institute, the nation’s premier language school, has developed a measurement series that rates knowledge and capacity on a 0 to 5+ scale. “O” is my knowledge of “hard” languages (Farsi, Pashto, Thai) and not much better for “easy” languages (Spanish, French, Italian). (Needless to say, what’s hard for one learner may be easy for another and vice versa.)

The power and importance of second (or third or fourth) language mastery is much more than just linguistic (though that is considerable); even more important, language mastery provides a window of unparalleled insight into culture. (Literature, music and art, of course, do as well which is why they play a central role in successful language study).

There is a truism in an old joke among linguists: what do you call someone who speaks three languages? Tri-lingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bi-lingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.

Alone among the advanced nations of the world Americans remain resolutely mono-lingual. More’s the pity because with the wave of immigration the opportunity to capitalize on second language knowledge has never been greater.

Think, for example, of the Spanish or Chinese-speaking immigrant, and what it would mean if second language mastery were required as a condition of graduation. The immigrant would be half-way there, just as the monolingual native speaker would be. All that remains is to do what every other advanced school system does, require facility in a language other that your mother-tongue.

Denis P. Doyle
January 30, 2007

Now that the big holidays are behind us and it time to get back to work -- it is time as well to think about holiday reading for the next holiday on the calendar, Martin Luther King Day, January 15. I have three candidates, very different in tone but strikingly similar in purpose: each touch on the issue which MLK Day is all about: civil rights.

The first is a Fordham Foundation Research Brief, Crystal Apple: Education Insiders’ Predictions for No Child Left Behind; the second is an elegant mea culpa essay by Michael J. Petrilli who knows whereof he speaks: Leaving My Lapel Pin Behind: Is the No Child Left Behind’s Birthday Worth Celebrating? And the third is Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. (The Petrilli piece is also this week's Spotlight article. The Michael Lewis book, published in 2006 by W. W. Norton, is available wherever books are sold.)

The Research Brief is the product of a survey of twelve savvy Washington “insiders” who are asked to turn their attention to 25 salient aspects of NCLB, beginning with their prediction as to when NCLB will be reauthorized (by a margin of 11 to 1 they say 2009 or later) and ending on a sad note in which (also by a margin of 11 to 1) they agree that national standards and tests are “not likely” to be mandated by Uncle Sam.

In addition to its central conclusion that “reauthorization is not likely until 2009” the prognosticators agree that whenever reauthorizations finally occurs NCLB’s “major contours are likely to remain unchanged.” In addition, they agree that some “significant changes have already been foreshadowed” such as growth models and the DoE’s pilot program “allowing schools to offer SES before public school choice.” Finally, they agree that some “big policy fights are shaping up” such as whether to focus on highly “effective” instead of highly “effective” teachers. So much the better.

(As an important aside, the Fordham Research Brief is handsomely formatted with easy to read and interpret graphics, no small feat that).

The Petrilli piece is remarkable for its candor and absence of rancor; he tells it like it is (and was), tracing his own close involvement with NCLB, his attachment to its vision and higher purpose and his disillusionment with the lack of capacity of the Law (any law, no doubt) to fine-tune human and organizational behavior. He is conflicted by the clash of noble impulse and the sobering realities of implementation: “using sticks and carrots to tug and prod states in desired directions has proven unworkable. It was worth trying but experience has shown us that this approach suffers from too much hubris and humility at the same time.”

His policy prescription is as noble as the NCLB’s underlying purpose: “distribute fund to the neediest students and publish transparent information about the performance of US schools.”

Although hope springs eternal, taken together with the Fordham Survey, it is hard to be optimistic about the likelihood of the Petrilli prescription being acted upon.

Finally there is Michael Lewis’s fine book, masquerading as a football story (the blind side refers to the right-handed quarterback who is unable to see the blitzing 350 pound, 6 foot 6, right guard bearing down upon him like a human freight train -- on his blind side -- about to crush the life out of him …before he can get a pass off…). True enough, Lewis is a master story teller and spins a football tale as well as he does a baseball one (His baseball book, about crunching the numbers, Moneyball is masterfully told as well). But for those of us who care about education the subtext of The Blind Side is the adventures of Michael Oher, one of 13-children of a crack-addicted mother from the Memphis slums. His extraordinary physical promise is held hostage to his education and cultural deficits. The public schools measure his IQ at 80 and treat him accordingly, leaving him unable to read let alone write.

Mirable dictu, in what reads like a modern fairly tale, this stunning physical specimen with a sweet disposition is adopted by a prosperous, white, Evangelical Republican family, enrolled in a virtually all-white Christian Academy and loved and tutored to a fare-thee-well. He finally gets his grades up and qualifies for high school football and then for college! It is a work in progress so there is as yet of end to give away, but this mix of education and sports is promising to say the least. Michael Oher may just emerge as one of the highest-paid players in the NFL. His story as told by Michael Lewis is nothing short of spell-binding. While hardly a policy prescription for the plight of the young black man The Blind Side reminds me of nothing so much as the Schindler’s List epigram: Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

Denis P. Doyle
January 9, 2007

The Report of The new Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce: Tough Choices or Tough Times was released last week with all the pomp and circumstance of a Presidential panel. But it was more than a government report. The work of a blue ribbon panel, it was rolled out by former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall and Bill Brock, a man with so many titles it is hard to know where to start: US Congressman, US Senator, US Special Trade Representative, Secretary of Labor, and Chairman of the Republican Party (bringing it back from the brink after the Nixon fiasco).

The 26-member, bi-partisan commission included such notables as former SC governor and Secretary of Education Richard Riley, MI Governor John Engler, MA Commissioner of Education David Driscoll, DC Superintendent of Schools Clifford B. Janey, NYC Chancellor Joel Klein (who along with his boss, Mayor Bloomberg missed the event because DCA was closed due to fog!), and Boston Superintendent Tom Payzant.

What was even more remarkable was the range of findings and recommendations, laying out a “plan for the total overhaul of US education by 2021.” Building on the work of the first commission in 1990 – “which never dreamed that we would end up competing with countries that could offer large numbers of highly skilled workers willing to work for low wages” – the commission called for a “total shakeup in how America educates its people.”

Not surprisingly, most of the ideas in the report were not new in-and-of-themselves – what is new is their combination, support and timing. For example, recommending high school leaving at age 16 (upon successful passage of a new, high stakes examination) owes an intellectual and practical debt to long-standing European practice.

Several aspects of the reform recommendations are so dramatic that they are specially noteworthy.

First, is a clarion call for high-stakes examinations at age 16 – while high stakes exams may still be unpopular among progressive educators they are one tool designed to make students partners in the teaching and learning process. They are a variant on the old “no pass, no play” concept popularized by none other than Ross Perot two decades ago. Together with a 16-year old leaving provision – for successful completers – students have no one to blame but themselves if they don’t pass on schedule. And if they don’t pass on schedule, the opportunity to eventually pass remains.

Second, the reforms pay for themselves -- over time. A long time I might add, but the die is cast. (If that were a spoken line, it would be repeated for emphasis: the reforms pay for themselves.) No single feature of the report could be more important, symbolically or practically. As anyone who has worried about institutional improvement knows, it is easy to dream of reform schemes when there is no spending limit. (If wishes were horses, beggars would ride).

Third, the report contains something to offend everyone, a sure sign it’s on the right track. The most offensive provision for teachers’ unions is the proposal to change pension systems to defined contribution rather than defined benefit programs.

Fourth, the report calls for an end to funding schools based on the local property tax, a mixed blessing to be sure. People love to complain about property taxes but it will be fascinating to see how this recommendation plays out.

Fifth, the report calls for a radical expansion in “contract” schools, a variant on charter schools that excites most readers (some positively, some negatively…).

The report contains other recommendations too numerous to go into here – national standards and assessments, universal high quality early childhood education, competitiveness accounts for example, -- but one thing is clear, Tough Choice or Tough Times is a tough-minded report that is sure to stimulate debate and much needed change.

Order the complete report on-line at: www.skillscommission.org or
www.joseybass.com or www.amazon.com or purchase it directly at Barnes and Noble for $19.95.

Denis P. Doyle
December 19, 2006

Depending on your definition, charter schools are either very old or relatively new. If by the term “charter school” you mean a school that serves the public – with public monies – and holds a government “charter” to operate, the idea is an old one, beginning with Boston Latin in 1635 (one year before Harvard) and including Philadelphia’s Central High (founded in 1838 and known colloquially as Boys High), SF’s Lowell High School (which traces its founding back to 1856, making it the oldest high school west of the Mississippi and which includes Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer among its illustrious alumni), Peter Stuyvesant (founded in 1904 and whose alumni include AFT President Al Shanker) and Bronx High School of Science (founded in 1938 and whose alumni include word maven William Safire and AFT President Sandy Feldman.) The list goes on and on, a virtual who’s who of American public schools.

Indeed, many distinguished public high schools look very much like charter schools – tubs on their own bottoms – that are de facto if not de jure independent institutions – think of New Trier north of Chicago, Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology, NC’s Science and Math High School (a state-wide boarding school), IMSA (Illinois Math and Science Academy, also a state-wide boarding school), Washington DC’s Woodrow Wilson or Montgomery County’s Walt Whitman. Because of their unique history and culture, each is free to pretty much go its own way; needless to say, each guards its autonomy jealously.

And then there are single building school districts which number in the thousands; for example, of the roughly 14,500 school districts in the nation, 4,924 are made up of one or two schools, and 12% -- 1,809 -- of the nation’s school districts enroll fewer than 150 students.

But in the popular mind, these institutions are not charter schools. Charter schools are institutions deliberately created (to use a Massachusetts term of art) “in but not under” public control, or “public schools of choice” (Lake and Hill, see below.) They are designed to break the bureaucratic strangle-hold of the public sector on public schools. No wonder they are both revered and reviled. Now more than a decade old with their number growing slowly and steadily is the verdict in or is the jury still out?

While not the final word, the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington has issued a definitive progress report, Hopes, Fears & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools in 2006, co-edited by Robin J. Lake and Paul T. Hill. (Seewww.crpe.org).

The numbers are instructive. In 1993-94 the first charter schools appeared; today there are more than 3,638 charter schools in 37 states serving more than one-million youngsters. In 2005 their number increased by 3.1%; in 2006 their number increased by 3.6% (because they are on average smaller than other public schools the number of students served does not increase as rapidly as the number of schools.)

And while many main-stream public school teachers are skeptical at best, hostility to charter schools is not universally the norm. The AFT, for example, reports that they have organized 50 charter schools as local bargaining units (as distinct from the larger bargaining unit which typically represents teachers district-wide rather than just school-wide.)

Among the most striking numbers in the charter school word is the number that close: according to Lake and Hill, 65 closed in 2004-05 and 106 closed in 2205-06. Far from being a sign of weaknesses, however, champions of charter schools see this as a sign certain that charter schools are a serious response to an a public policy dilemma. (Creative destruction as famed economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described the phenomenon.)

Indeed the principal reason public school educators endorse charter schools – insofar as they may endorse them at all -- are to learn from them. To date the lessons have been few and unsurprising: parents, teachers and students prefer going to a school of their choice than one to which they have been assigned. Happily, charter schools do not appear to be skimming the best and the brightest nor are the racially or socioeconomically isolated. But the holy grail of education reform – significant increases in academic performance – has proven to be elusive, with test scores no higher in most charter schools than in corresponding public schools.

Having said that, one element of one set of charter schools (as reported by Tough in The New York Times magazine two weeks ago – the KIPP or Knowledge is Power Program schools – jumps off the page: the achievement gap is closing in those schools not just because of high expectations (which are necessary but not sufficient) but because of practice linked to high expectations: 40% more time on task. A longer day, a longer week (half a day on Saturday) and a longer year pay off.

The mantra of the modern economy is to work smarter, not harder. But KIPP reminds us that you have to work harder as well; indeed, in the case of academic achievement gains, working harder is working smarter.

Denis P. Doyle
December 7, 2006

Not long ago, responsibility for the full weight of academic achievement (or lack thereof) fell on the shoulders of the nation’s schools and teachers; that at least was the underlying premise of NCLB. To only slightly exaggerate, suggesting that students bore some responsibility was blaming the victim. Or to be more precise, to suggest that low achievers should work harder (or indeed, work hard) was unfair to them. (High achievers could take care of themselves the corresponding argument ran).

If The New York Times Magazine is to be believed, however, the debate is beginning to shift. An article by one of the magazine’s editors, aptly named Paul Tough, What it Takes To Make a Student, examines what it is that distinguishes good from indifferent students. (November 26, 2006). The findings are not surprising. First and foremost, achievement tracks with race and income; poor minority students do less well in school than advantaged white and Asian students. No surprise that.

But what is interesting is the underlying analysis – poor children, according to Tough, get significantly less support at home than their better-off counterparts, in measurable ways. For example, citing research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, he observed that by age 3 children of professionals had vocabularies of “about 1,100 words” while children whose parents were on welfare had “vocabularies of 525 words.” Even more to the point, “the average IQ among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average IQ of 79.”

Equally telling was the number of “encouragements” (praise and approval) and “discouragements” (prohibitions and disapproval) that make up the lives of these children: again by age 3, the professional child had heard 500,000 encouragements v. 80,000 discouragements while “for the welfare children the situation was reversed,” 75,000 encouragements to 200,000 discouragements.

Finally, later researchers conclude that there “are big differences in children’s intellectual growth.” Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, for example, observes that children from more well-off homes were raised in an environment characterized by a continuing and vigorous verbal give-and-take. She found that “while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.”

Tough concludes that "the real advantages middle-class children gain come from […] the language their parents use, the attitudes toward life they convey.”

Can schools close these gaps? Tough argues that some can and do, that more can and should. By way of illustration he describes the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) academies and Achievement First, as well as Uncommon Schools. With a longer day and year, they offer significantly more instructional time. But in these settings, instruction is more than academic. It includes attitudes and behavior; students are taught to “nod” when they get it (something middle class kids do automatically) and establish eye-contact with the teacher (or other student if he or she is speaking). Citing Philadelphia-based researchers Seligman and Duckworth, Tough quotes Duckworth’s finding that a self-discipline inventory she administered has higher predictive value for GPA– by a factor of two -- than IQ.

In fairness to the loyal opposition, Tough cites the criticism of former NY Times columnist Richard Rothstein who argues that the schools can’t do it on their own; for example, he asserts that “KIPP’s model cannot be replicated on a wide scale.”

Nonetheless, the evidence is in.  Tough concludes: with the proper resources, the will to win, hard work, effort and time, the gap can be closed.

But “without making a much more serious commitment to the education of poor and minority students, it is hard to see how the federal government will be able to deliver on the promise contained in No Child Left Behind. The law made states responsible for turning their poorest children into accomplished scholars in a little more than a decade — a national undertaking on the order of a moon landing — but provided them with little assistance or even direction as to how they might accomplish that goal. And recently, many advocates have begun to argue that the Education Department has quietly given up on No Child Left Behind.”

At the moment, the jury is out and only time will tell.

Denis Doyle
November 29, 2006

Needless to say, I accepted with alacrity an invitation to two back-to-back BECTA conferences in Birmingham last week. (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency: see www.becta.org.uk) And I was not disappointed. For years I’ve been a student of comparative education; when I was in the government I had the good fortune to participate in various OECD/CERI studies (it was tough duty to go to Paris on a regular basis, but someone had to do it), the Japanese/US Culcon study, the US/Australia Policy Project and others.

Each was fascinating and provided real insights into problem solving – the problems were often similar, the solutions often radically different. The standout was the way in which other countries treat the question of public funding for denominational schools. It turns out that every developed democracy (excepting only Italy) provides some financial support for religiously affiliated schools.

Upon examination, the reason is not hard to fathom – in the early and mid-19th century, when compulsory education swept the world -- most countries had a state religion (or tried to balance competing claims of more than one denomination) and quite naturally required religious observance as part of the curriculum. The only way to be fair to non-co-religionists was to fund different denominational schools. Different strokes for different folks.

The most striking example is Australia, which adopted most of the US Constitution chapter and verse. And the Australian high court goes back to the Federalist Papers when constitutional issues are before it. Yet Australian policy is the direct opposite of US policy – Australia funds religiously affiliated schools where the US does not. Why? US tradition emphasizes the “establishment” clause, Australian emphasizes the “free exercise” clause, arguing that so long as all religions are treated equally (including irreligion) no one religion is preferred to another.

The same language can produce opposite results, proof certain that there are, indeed, different strokes for different folks.

I was reminded of this at the BECTA meetings by the use of a term which has quite a different meaning in the US, digital divide. At home it is shorthand for inequality, with the well-to-do having more, the less well-off having, well, less. In the IT world it is meant to convey a sense of disadvantageness.

At the BECTA conference, at least, two speakers used the term with a very different and powerful spin. To them digital divide expressed the difference between technologically empowered students (at least on their own time) and the antediluvian technological posture of most schools.

The most vivid example is the nearly ubiquitous cell phone, which – in the hands of young people at least -- is a learning tool of enormous power. Yet most schools have gone to great lengths to ban its use during the school day. Indeed, many schools forbid students to turn them on whilst school is in session. The digital divide here is between school and student, with the school in the unattractive, anti-intellectual position of cutting itself off from the modern world.

Not to be confused with sensible “use” policies (forbidding, for example, casual conversational use during school hours), the digital divide under discussion at the BECTA conferences was directed toward the schools’ Luddite habit of mindlessly opposing technological innovation no matter what. And the cell phone offered a striking example.

In this scenario, the school is the place where technology is not used, the bigger world outside is where it is used, a dangerous dichotomy if ever there was one. It’s hard enough to gain and hold the attention of bored and restless teenagers as it is. Deny them cell phone access at your peril.

Denis P. Doyle
November 14, 2006

By training I’m a political scientist – by temperament I’m a people watcher – together these attributes turn me into a political junkie, particularly when the stakes are high and the issues intense. How much higher can they get than this election? Not very. Even though the president’s name is not on the ballot, his policies are, and the possibility of a Democratic victory in both houses has never been higher. Some pundits are talking about a Democratic pick-up of 30 to 40 seats in the house with 7 in the Senate.

True, the Democrats have developed the habit of grasping defeat from the jaws of victory to a fine art, so anything is possible, but the smart money in Washington is on a Democratic sweep. Time will tell.

It is fashionable today to describe Washington as suffering from gridlock, even with all three branches of government in Republican hands. But as David S. Broder points out in his November 2Washington Post column Behind the Gridlock, in addition to the Iraq War, a good deal has happened on Bush’s watch: quoting Bill Galston Pietro Nivola (both of the Brookings Institution) among other things, a major new cabinet department has been created, significant tax roll backs have occurred, massive enlargement of Medicare and major education reform initiatives have been enacted. (See www.washingtonpost.com)

True, without working majorities the President’s policies – on Iraq, North Korea and Iran to mention the most obvious – will be subject to significant scrutiny, just as his tax policies will be. Secretary Rumsfeld may be put on a short leash or out to pasture altogether. But as Robert Kagen notes (on the same page of the Post in Staying the Course, Win or Lose) in the 60 years since WWII there “has been much more continuity than discontinuity in foreign policy.”)

Similarly whether or not the Democrats are returned, education and technology policies are not likely to change in a major way. In part because the chair of the House Education committee is expected to be George Miller Jr. (D-CA), but in part because the education reforms embodied in No Child Left Behind enjoy broad bipartisan support (at least most of the concepts do. Some differences as to practice will emerge. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must report that my first job out of college was as a legislative analyst reporting to a committee chaired by George Miller Sr. How time flies.)

George Miller Jr.’s was the liberal voice in No Child Left Behind and he has remained a staunch supporter. But his was not a voice in the wilderness –he spoke for many liberals who were dismayed by the stubbornness of the achievement gap problem.

Indeed, it is not too much to assert that many reformers of the LBJ era (when the federal role in education began in earnest) thought that the achievement gap would be self-correcting: integrate the schools, spend more money, target the low-achieving, and voila the achievement gap would spontaneously close. It was not to be.

This is why many supporters of NCLB see it as the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. (It was no accident that the name was shamelessly lifted from Marion Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund.)

Having said this, I will venture one prediction. Win, lose or draw, the new Congress (together with the lame duck Bush administration) will be favorably disposed toward value-added measures rather than continued heavy reliance on AYP for the simple reason that it makes more sense. Easy to say, hard to do, but a teacher who is able to increase student achievement across the board is doing tougher work than marginal achievement gains for a few to get through the AYP ceiling, which looks more and more arbitrary as NCLB matures.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 6.44, no 179
November 2, 2006.

Carl J Schramm, President and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation (devoted to entrepreneurship) has just published a thought provoking (and mercifully short) book:  The Entrepreneurial Imperative: How America’s Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World (And Change Your Life. Harper Collins, NY, 2006). (Seewww.kauffman.org).  The title to the contrary notwithstanding, his message goes well beyond the economy.  It includes the University, government, the non-profit sector and schools generally.

America’s secret weapon, he avers, is our tradition (and current practice) of entrepreneurship.  By entrepreneurship he means a heady mix of risk taking and the creation of new ways of doing things (or creating new things altogether, or all of the above).  He makes the case convincingly.  So convincingly that I am moved to try my virtual pen at it.  What kind of school would a modern entrepreneur design?  The short answer is many different kinds.  Different strokes for different folks.  Just what you would expect in a diverse society with a rich history and tradition of local control.

Yet as we all know, American schools, public and private, North and South, rich and poor, small and big, all look very much alike.  Why?  There is a broadly-based (and largely unconscious) social consensus on what schools should look like and act like.  Thus the typical school system is arranged with thirteen grades (K-12), meets 180 days a year, is organized into discreet classrooms, presided over by a teacher who stands (or sits, in elementary school) at the head of the room.  Students are routinely tested and measured, advance grade by grade, and 75% of whom eventually “earn” a diploma. Sound familiar?

What if we were to start from scratch?  Would we design a similar system?  Hopefully not.  To the contrary, we would recognize that schooling should fit the cultural and economic system of which it is a part, and we are a long way from the agrarian calendar and factory model which inspired the modern school.  Today’s reality is latch-key kids, working moms, high tech, high touch (games and tools): in a word, multitasking.  The social order kids are part of is a world with few adult role models.  It is the peer group that dominates, which is impressionable, with no institutional memory, flexible to the point of chaos, open, innovative and more than ever in need of structure and adult guidance.

Indeed, the two most pressing needs of modern culture and the economy are a safe place for children to be from dawn till dusk, year ‘round, and mastery of the knowledge and skills kids need to take their place in society when they grow up.  No social institution (save only the family) is better prepared to serve these needs than the school.  But not as it is presently organized.  It should look like the modern high tech firm – open 24/7, year ‘round, with rank established not by time in the saddle but by demonstrated accomplishment.

Imagine a school which is open when the family needs child care and that provides a constant stream of academically oriented enrichment activities; one that is standards-based (not age-based) in which you advance at your own pace.  These deceptively simple structural changes would have a profound impact – for example, for whatever reason, students could “stop out” for days, weeks or months at a time, returning to where they left off when they came back.  They could do so to join an expedition, live abroad, prepare for exams, participate in Olympic training, or simply take a break.

Alternately, they could accelerate, covering a traditional K-12 curriculum in ten rather than thirteen years.  What would they do with the “extra time?”  Learn a second or third language, earn an AA degree by age 18, graduate from college early (by doing the same thing in college: compressing four years of course work into two and one-half or three. Or earning an AB and MA in four rather than five years.) 

With the costs of private colleges reaching $35 thousand per year, the economic incentives (and rewards) alone should be enough to stimulate such change.

That it doesn’t is a commentary on the heavy hand of tradition and the lack or entrepreneurial vitality in the education realm.
                 
Denis P. Doyle
October 25, 2006
Issue 6.43, no. 178

According to the conventional wisdom, there are two paths to institutional improvement, top-down or bottom-up. I’m convinced that this is the fallacy of the false alternative. Neither view captures the reality of change; in healthy institutions change is not either-or, it is simultaneously top-down and bottom up. Only the mix and proportions change. Self-directed, bottom-up change characterizes energetic and capable organizations with a vision of the future and the institutional capacity to realize it. Less successful institutions require more top-down guidance and support.

Recognizing that schools are at different points on the improvement curve – with different objectives and capacities -- means that different school districts have different leadership demands. But as Edmund Burke knew -- no matter the circumstances -- the duty of leaders is to lead.

One of the leader’s central tasks is to understand how to balance top-down and bottom-up strategies.

The flexibility to accommodate an appropriate mix of top-down and bottom-up improvement strategies is essential. For example, many big city reform strategies call for a mix of centralization and decentralization: top-down standards designed to elicit local, bottom-up responses which are measured by centrally mandated tests.

In the UK the Blair government (building on the Thatcher government) has done just that: mandatory national standards set the tone, but local schools are free to meet them as their talents, capacities and interests lead them; national exams and a corps of Her Majesties Inspectors confirm that the standards have been met (or not met, as the case may be).

In the event they are met so much the better; in the event they are not met schools can be reconstituted.

The Blair governments insights are that top-down and bottom-up may be in tension but are not contradictory – so long as schools are free to meet the standards however they like they are the picture of bottom-up improvement. Mandating national standards and national exams are the picture of restrained and rational top-down improvement. Together they produce high standards without standardization.

And so long as the process is fully transparent everyone is a winner. Local control that works is honored and troubled schools can – and do – seek help. Indeed, transparency works for institutions much as it does for individuals, with public embarrassment the price of not meeting standards. (And with the availability of comparative information, schools can’t cry “foul.”)

Solutions must be expressly designed and deployed with these realities in mind – for the modern school, the operational metaphor should be the symphony orchestra, with the conductor assembling the best individual performers available, selecting the music and coordinating, guiding and inspiring the individual musicians.

True, an inspired conductor can get an ordinary orchestra to do extraordinary things but just listen to an extraordinary conductor with an extraordinary group of performers. This mix of top-down and bottom-up brings out the best that the conductor and each instrumentalist has to offer. The individual performers are obliged to offer peak performances, consistent with their talent and capacity. So too school improvement.

Without pushing the metaphor too far, think of a weak symphony orchestra, one in its infancy. In this setting, the conductor’s first order of business is capacity building, “buying” or “making” an orchestra that can handle a demanding musical inventory. In the case of the symphony orchestra, the conductor, the performers and the audience all know when a solid orchestra has been successfully assembled, one that is ready to strike out and undertake a demanding repertoire.

Strike up the music!

Denis P. Doyle
October 19, 2006

“What gets measured gets taught,” is an old chestnut, true enough, but it tends to obscure a deeper truth: how things are measured determines what is learned. For example, if testing includes written essays – not just multiple choice questions – the likelihood of students learning to write clear, expository prose is substantially increased. And if the contrary obtains – no essays tests is the rule – students are much less likely to learn to write.

So too in the case of required declamation and auditions – not just true and false questions on a machine scored bubble sheet – students will learn to declaim and perform in public. Imagine a silent debate team – selected without reference to performance -- or an orchestra or band with musicians trained by the book but never performing let alone auditioning.

Or if examinations include oral expression – as they do in good language classes – students will learn to speak the language being studied.

Recognized early on by the Japanese (due to a shortage of English speakers) they created the JET program (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program) to “enhance internationalization in Japan by promoting mutual understanding.” The program “aims to enhance foreign language instruction in Japan and to promote international exchange.” (See www.us.emb-japan.og.jp/JETProgram.homepage.html.)

Now in its 20^th year, it is a joint program with 44 participating countries enrolling more than 5500 participants in 2006. JET is a textbook case of why book learning on its own is not enough.

This is all by way of making an old assertion once again: American schools suffer from a measurement plague driven by the factory model that created modern education. Administrative convenience and cost control are the hall marks of modern testing rather than thoughtful examination of what students know and are able to do. (It is costly to score essays, the argument goes. The proper rejoinder is Harvard President Derek Bok’s comment: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.)

In fairness to machine scored, multiple-choice, true and false testing does serve a purpose: it can be fast and inexpensive and can provide gross comparisons that have real utility. Witness AYP, NAEP, TIMSS-R and PISA, broadly based comparisons which provide useful snapshots for policy makers. Insofar as they go.

But there is more to good education than gross comparisons of test scores. At its best education goes back to its root meaning, from the Latin, to draw out. Good education is discerning and individualized, discrete and personal, circumstances inaccessible to machine-based testing. There is, for example, a visible and an invisible curriculum. The visible curriculum is taught directly and didactically: Latin, algebra, chemistry, English, math and the like. To be sure, some of what students have learned can be tested on machine-based tests.

But by way of contrast consider the invisible curriculum, the behavior that students model (to use the current buzz word), learned by osmosis from family, peers and caring teachers: work ethic, punctuality, interpersonal skills, respect for self and respect for others for starters. Indeed, ask a prospective employer and she is likely to say that these traits are more important in the work place than book knowledge.

In sum good education includes more than machine scored tests can measure. But as quality is central to good education, this does not mean that qualitative measures can’t be quantified and reported. Even though an “A+” violinist can only be found by blind audition – there is no machine scored test that will do it – an “A+” is an “A+” however it is bestowed. So too the “A+” essayist or aspiring Nobel Laureate. The judgments that lead to an “A+” designation may be as much art as science but the outcome can be quantified and reported by machine, even if they cannot be discerned by machines.

Where does this lead? Bring back the essay exam!

Denis P. Doyle
October 11, 2006

I've often wondered why case studies, widely used in law schools, medical schools and business schools, are the exception not the rule in the study of education.  And I'm beginning to form a theory.  Law, medicine and business are continually and rapidly evolving; keeping up with change is not only desirable in these fields, it is necessary.  The fate of the uninformed is to lose: the law suit, the diagnosis or market share, as the case may be.  Clients, patients and customers know this and the discerning among them demand the latest thinking and practice.

As it happens, case studies are among the most powerful tools at our disposal to understand change and to separate the wheat from the chaff.  They artfully answer the questions why, what, how and to what effect.  They do so in a lively, realistic format; by and large they are convincing because they are based on real-life experiences. And they are often fun to read and discuss.

By way of contrast education is unchanging and uniform. What would case studies reveal?  For the past 150 years schools have been more similar than dissimilar, notwithstanding the fact that they are independently managed and operated.  Local control is a legal reality but cultural non-starter.  (Given the fact that there are over 14,000 legally independent school districts in the US, the proverbial man-from-Mars would expect some significant variability among them.  Given their relentless sameness, he would be astonished to discover that they were not centrally controlled.  To understand this phenomenon, he would have to understand that the force of custom and habit is stronger than law.)

It is noteworthy that while case studies use evidence and quantify what they can, one of their distinguishing characteristics is that they are willing to pursue qualitative evidence when quantitative evidence is sparse.  This is true knowledge-based decision-making, situated on the boundary-line that separates (or more precisely "joins") art and science.

Dr. Atul Gawande, one of The New Yorker's premier medical writers, has an Annals of Medicine piece in the current issue (The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial October 9, 2006) that powerfully makes the point.  His essay advances a fascinating set of facts about obstetrics; the advances in the field - and they are astounding - are based on insights into the effects of practice not double-blind studies (the scientific gold standard.)

Indeed, in obstetrics, many double-blind studies would not only be impractical, they would be immoral. (Random assignment to test the impact of different protocols would simply be unacceptable). But being forced to rely on less rigorous evidence has not impeded significant advances in care, saving countless mothers and babies.  Gawande does do some counting and the numbers for the US alone are dazzling: "if the statistics of 1940" (the year I was born) "had persisted, fifteen thousand mothers would have died last year (instead of fewer than five hundred) - and a hundred and twenty thousand newborns (instead of one-sixth that number)".

But if historically education case studies have been few and far between, that is no reason to not conduct them now. Why?  Policy and practice are beginning to reveal distinctive differences in the undertaking we call formal schooling.  In addition, modern IT makes data available with astonishing detail, accuracy and speed.  And not only are the numbers more readily available, analytic power has never been greater.

Taken together - case studies that reveal changes in policy, practice and IT - offer unparalleled opportunities to learn what works in an accessible and eminently useful format.

Denis P. Doyle
October 6, 2006

Last week, the Broad Foundation hosted a splendid series of meetings to announce the award of the Broad prize (pronounced with a long “o” as in road) to the school district that has shown the most improvement in the preceding year. Among five deserving finalists, the winner was clearly a sentimental favorite as well: Boston. Under Tom Payzant’s skillful and patient leadership the Boston public schools did what the home team – the Red Sox -- had finally done so gloriously: won! Kudos all around.

The only intimation of a surprise was that the host city – New York – twice nominated, did not win. (The smart money in the hall before the announcement of the winner was NYC.) But as speaker after speaker intoned, everyone won. And a splendid stage upon which to win it was: MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art.

The one real surprise was the luncheon speaker, Bill Clinton. What was surprising was not what he said but what he did not say; to the disappointment of many if not most of the hundreds of guests, he spoke for no more than five minutes, delivering what must have been the shortest speech of his life. But it was vintage Clinton – what there was of it -- homespun, folksy and connected. (The standing ovations before and after the speech were longer than the speech itself.)

The star of the show was Mayor Bloomberg who never ceases to amaze with his genuine eloquence and concern for the issues (art as well as education; he rattled off imposing statistics about the newly re-opened MOMA and its economic impact on the city). (While there has been no formal announcement about an impending Bloomberg presidential candidacy, remember you heard it here first!)

The event began with a panel discussion among the nominees (pre-announcement) and they were consistent in their support of NCLB (with some important qualifications): NYC Chancellor Klein, for example, noted that NY supported measuring improvement not just by gaps between student groups. While he didn’t use the term value added he might as well have.

To my delight several superintendents on the panel noted -- with approval -- that they supported what has until recently been disdainfully called rote learning or memorization.

For a very long time now I have waged a fruitless battle over this issue. (Being opposed to memorization is as PC as opposing “teaching to the test.”)

I, for one, am convinced that memorization is both sound pedagogically and fun to boot. Among other things, kids love to memorize things, whether it is lists of states, times’ tables or poetry. Not to put too fine a point on it, memorization of fundamentals (such as learning to tie your shoes or tell time, two accomplishments I still remember mastering) is essential to further learning. Why? It frees the mind for other, more complex activities. Habit is a convenience and memory a great source of pleasure.

Indeed, profound memory is one of the few things that distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom. So important was memory in antiquity that in the Phaedrus Socrates declaims on the evils of writing because it weakens memory. And in pre-literate societies feats of memory – such as the ability to recite epic poetry or book after book of the bible – were widely admired.

The truth, as we all know from South Pacific, is that “you have to be carefully taught” even (or perhaps especially) the line she’s “broad where a broad should be broad.” It’s as entertaining to recall as it was the first time you heard it.

Denis P. Doyle
September 26, 2006

The Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools is out again (38 years and counting) and once again it is a treasure trove of information. (Phi Delta Kappan, September 2006, Volume 88, Number 1, p 41-56.  See /www.pdkintl.org/kappan). Among other things, it repeats some questions year after year providing unparalleled longitudinal information.

To be sure, many of the responses are subject to several interpretations: the surest way to assess this is to look at the poll and its answers yourself.  But some of the more important questions are fairly unambiguous: my favorites are displayed in tables 2, 3 and 4 which have to do with giving the schools a grade; “A” though “FAIL.” There are three variants (with sub-variants):

• What grade would you give the public schools here?
• What grade would you give the school your oldest child attends?
• What grade would you give the public schools nationally?

(The sub-variants include “national totals, “no children in school,” and “public school parents” with side-by-side comparisons of ’06 and ’05).

The results are unidirectional year-after-year: about half the respondents give the public schools “here” an “A” or a “B:” high praise; two-thirds give the school their “oldest child attends” an “A” or a “B:” higher praise yet! Does it come as a surprise then to learn that only one fifth (21%) give the public schools nationally an “A” or a “B”?

What’s going on?  Precisely the opposite of the NIMBY phenomenon (which characterizes the process of locating a prison or a nuclear waste dump which unfailingly elicits the response, “not in my back yard!”). By way of contrast, it’s as though the public believes that when it comes to schools, everything is fine in their back yard. (The same phenomenon is at work in polls about Congress, in which respondents are critical of the institution and its members but support their own member.)

The most charitable interpretation is that “ignorance is bliss.”  (“Where ignorance is bliss ‘tis folly to be wise…” from An Ode to a Distant Prospect of Eton College by Thomas Gray); the less charitable interpretation is simple intransigence, as in the old chestnut about the final examination question:  “which is the bigger problem, ignorance or apathy.”  The correct answer, of course, is “I don’t know and I don’t care!”

The most realistic response is actually political – people are basically conservative (the definition of conservatism offered by JFK was “unless it is necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”)  People may claim to like change, but truth be told, most people prefer “having changed” to “changing.”  Insofar as this is the case, it makes the likelihood of sweeping school change dim to non-existent for obvious reasons.  To compound the problem, the most satisfied respondents are likely to be opinion leaders.

Indeed, the first table in the PDK/Gallup Poll makes the point: it reports that 71%  of the respondents believe that “to improve public education” the “focus should be on reforming the existing system”  rather than “finding an alternative” to the existing system.

The best spin that can be put on this table is that it is a classic example of what conservative columnist George Will calls the “fallacy of the false alternative.”  Reform and transform need not exist in opposition, particularly in a “system” of more than 14,000 nominally independent school districts.  In the spirit of standards-driven education, some districts should have the nerve and the opportunity to experiment – radically – with different forms of organization, both pedagogical and administrative.

Then step back and measure results.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 6.38
September 13, 2006

I’ve written before about the importance of student effort and I’m drawn irresistibly back to the subject because of Jay Mathew’s and Juan Williams back-to-back pieces in last week’s Washington Post (see View point 171).

They make parallel cases describing lack of student effort among non-college bound youngsters.  Williams focuses on inner-city black students, Mathews on the rest.  But their conclusions are much the same – youngsters who don’t exert effort don’t do well in school, and those who don’t do well in school are not likely to do well in life (Bill Gates excepted).

Reading between the lines, the problem the policy wonk and practitioner both face is how to avoid blaming the victim.  If it’s not the student’s fault, whose is it?  The teacher’s?  Parents’?  Society at-large? The organization we call formal schooling?

Actually, the easy answer is probably the right one – school is the problem.  And reorganizing school is the solution.  Indeed, we stand at an historic threshold in which public opinion may be ready to support wholesale school reorganization.

To get some idea of what might work, we should look at systems that do work in the larger society: the for-profit economy, the non-profit sector, the military, entertainment and sports.

What do they have in common with good schooling? From the for-profit economy, we get incentives and rewards; from the non-profit sector, we get selflessness and a higher good; from the military we get honor and duty; from entertainment, the spotlight and accolades; from sports, discipline and practice.  Taken together they offer a set of insights that schools can profitably take to heart.

First of all, schools should mirror the larger culture of which they are a part.  It is by now a truism that today’s schools are an anachronism, relying on an agrarian calendar and a factory model of organization.  The modern school should look like a small, high tech firm, with the clock, calendar and organization patterns it embodies.

Indeed, the standards movement and the choice movement should be combined to act as incentives and rewards for both individual and institutional change.  The standards movement should be refined to emphasize progression measured by mastery (as it is in the arts, sports and language study) rather than time-in-the-saddle.  In this scenario, students are responsible for their own advancement; they can’t simply play out the clock.

A diploma should offer evidence that the bearer has successfully mastered a demanding curriculum (as it does in France.  Three diploma levels are recognized in France bien, assez bien, and tres bien reflecting a broad social consensus on school quality).

For its part, choice should exist on both the supply and demand side – teachers and administrators should have the opportunity to strut their stuff by offering education on their terms (subject only to their ability to attract students); and students should be free to choose among offerings that satisfy compulsory attendance requirements.  (This is the way it works in Denmark).

Schools should be open 240 days a year 12 hours a day!  Radical? Only in an education setting.  That’s the way the rest of the economy operates; so should schools.  And with fewer and fewer stay-at-home moms (or dads) we should deal candidly with schools’ custodial function. (Japanese youngsters go to school 240 days a year which is one reason they are so advanced).
And finally, there should be real incentives and rewards for academic accomplishment – the most obvious is cash on the barrel head, an idea as old as ROI (return on investment).  College-bound youngsters know that education pays (and pays handsomely); dropouts don’t.  A program to send the same message to students in danger of dropping out – that education pays, to encourage them to apply themselves academically -- could be well worth the investment.

Denis P. Doyle
August 29, 2006

A rare double header, two education pieces remarkable for their candor and policy relevance, appeared on the Op-Ed page of Monday’s edition of The Washington Post. (August 21, 2006. See www.washingtonpost.com for Banish the Bling: A Culture of Failure Taints Black America by Juan Williams and Too Few Overachievers: Academically Stressed Students Aren’t the Country’s Norm by Jay Mathews.)

On the surface, they appear to make points as different as night and day. Williams laments “a far more sinister obstacle facing African American young people today” than racism: “a culture steeped in bitterness and nihilism, a culture that is a virtual blueprint for failure.” Williams wonders “have we taken our eyes off the prize?”

Mathews opens with a cautionary tale: “be careful when you visit Walt Whitman High School …it is full of unhappy, overworked teenagers.” Mathews goes on to comment that “it would be a relief to many educators if … highly motivated students were typical and overachievement were the greatest threat to high school education today. But the sad truth is quite the opposite.”

Williams and Mathews may be approaching education from opposite ends of the spectrum, but their findings are not as different as one might expect. Indeed, expectations are the education issue of the day. According to Williams, one group of students – poor blacks, mostly urban -- expect far too little of them selves. Many of them distain academic accomplishment altogether, accusing those who do well in school of “acting white.”

According to Mathews a similar phenomenon afflicts middle class white youngsters who are not fast-tracking into the relatively small handful of highly competitive colleges and universities – they too expect too little of themselves.

What distinguish the two groups identified by Williams and Mathews are not intrinsic differences but where they stand in the education queue. The youngsters that Williams writes about are at the end of the line, the youngsters Mathews writes about are closer to the front. But both groups are condescending about academic achievement, to their own and society’s detriment.

To my knowledge this phenomenon was first formally reported by former UC Berkeley professor (now dead) Nigerian Anthropologist John Ogbu in research conducted in DC schools more than a decade ago. He reported that academic achievement was actively frowned upon in much of the black community.

I would argue from personal experience alone that the phenomenon described by Ogbu (and Williams and Mathews) is neither new nor restricted to the black community – I have vivid memories from my own racially integrated high school. There, in Chicago in the late 1950’s, intellectual accomplishment was the object of derision by most students, white and black. But if it is not new, the consequences are more severe today than they were in the waning days of the industrial era. Then it was possible to find work with only a grade school diploma. Today some college work is essential.

Indeed, at one level college and the industrial economy were not incompatible – in my case, I paid for much of college by working as a member of the hod carriers and laborers union – as a carpenter’s helper -- on major construction projects. (I was the only white laborer on the job where the first black union carpenter in Chicago was hired; in an inspired bit of personnel management the foreman assigned me to him!)

I remember one other thing – innocently asking the foreman’s son (who worked with the survey crew) where he was going to college. He wasn’t.

The policy implications of Williams’ and Mathews’ analyses are several – first, more must be expected of students but at the same time students must expect more of themselves. The parallel would be athletics – if kids worked as hard at academics as many do at basketball or football their academic performance would be off the charts. Second, to get such performance the academic experience must be transformed. (One good definition of craziness is doing the same old thing and expecting different results). And third, low levels of academic accomplishment are a death sentence in the modern economy – American society simply can’t afford it.

In the final analysis, perhaps it is as simple as Richard Hofstadter’s observation in his timeless classic Anti-Intellectualism in the American Way of Life that our schools do not escape the American disregard for the examined life.

Denis P. Doyle
August 22, 2006

You remember Charles Murray of bell-curve infamy; a decade ago he co-authored a book with Richard Herrnstein which gave him instant notoriety. He picked a politically taboo subject and treated it in a politically incorrect way.  He argued that the evidence revealed disparities in IQ by race – some people (by race) were smarter (or less smart, as the case may be) along racially identifiable lines.  (If his findings had been counter intuitive one wonders what kind of reception his work would have received. PC is as PC does.)

Be that as it may, it fell to conservatives to debunk his findings, with no less conservative an organization than the Heritage Foundation dismissing them because “taboos exist for a reason…”  Leon Kass delivered the coup de grace by returning to Aristotle’s distinction between good and bad, useful and useless knowledge.  Even if racial disparities exist, Kass argued, such knowledge is useless and may be bad – no good policy can flow from it.  Abandon hope all ye who enter here, he might have said.

This time the object of Murray’s thinking is NCLB; he laments that it is not doing all that it promised or all that it might do.  About this he is right.  Would that the effects were more powerful and more dramatic.  But social change – not to mention intellectual change – moves more slowly. 

Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation has fashioned a carefully crafted rebuttal, just as NCLB architect Sandy Kress has.  (To see Mike’s piece, visitwww.edexcellence.netand go to the July 29, 2006 story in Gadfly, Dropping Acid; to see Sandy’s Dallas News piece from August 13, 2006 seehttp://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-kress_13edi.ART.State.Edition1.2bd0b3b.html)

But if Murray’s methodology leaves much to be desired, there is a place for legitimate criticism of NCLB: indeed, there should be spirited debate about it.  For my part I am concerned about one aspect in particular – NCLB casts in stone the patterns and habits of the late nineteenth and twentieth century just when we need to be freed from most of that inheritance.

What does it cast in stone?  Lock-step age grouping, the agrarian calendar and the industrial metaphor that treats schools as assembly lines:  in this schema, all first graders are six-years old, they go to school 180 days a year, and advance to second grade when they’ve moved all the way down the first grade conveyer belt.  (As Al Shanker wryly noted, you don’t improve performance by running the conveyer belt longer and faster…)

Indeed, the opportunity inherent in a true standards-based system is to throw away the key and start from scratch.  We all know that different kids have different learning curves at different times.  In a true standards-based system you’d study till you got it (as you do in sophisticated language and music schools).  Schools would be open 12 hours a day, 240 (or more) days per year, and diplomas would be awarded on the basis of demonstrated mastery of a demanding core curriculum: for starters I’d vote for ELA, math (including Algebra and Geometry), science, at least one foreign language (spoken and written), history (US and world), art and music (including performing as well as appreciation).

Some kids would finish in 10 years, some might take 14 years, but everyone could reach the finish line (just as most people are able to earn a driver’s license.) 

In such a brave new world, all organizational and pedagogical bets would be off and innovation – organizational, technological and pedagogical -- could flourish in schooling just as it does in the rest of the economy and society at large.

Denis P. Doyle
August 15, 2006

My 95-year old mother died last week, after a long and full life.  The good news was that she was ready to go.  The bad news is that we will miss her.  As Lincoln reputedly said, “all that I am I owe to my mother.”  She died as she had lived, with a smile and a song.  The attending nurse, dressed in a bright yellow smock, said her last words were the song, “You are my sunshine.”

At such times as these, we are called upon to celebrate the memory of loved ones, and my memories are rich and varied, particularly the educational ones.  She was kind to a fault and loved children; her favorite pastime was reading aloud just as our favorite pastime was being read to. It was a source of inspiration to us and she invariably agreed to my sister’s and my pleading, “just one more chapter.”

When she was concerned about the quality of the post-War Chicago public schools I was about to attend (in 1945, and yes, the issues were the same then as they are today) she sought out the wise counsel of a favorite uncle, Reed College Philosophy Professor Joseph Hart (who was by the standards of the day a famous educator).  He told her not to worry, no matter how bad or good the school, I had to come home at the end of the day.  To Uncle Joe, mothers were our first and most important teachers.

But I outfoxed them both.  By temperament I was more Huckleberry Finn than Albert Einstein and at five years of age announced that I was not going to Kindergarten.  My mother dutifully inquired: “was I serious?”  When I assured her that I was, she said OK, no doubt thinking I would relent. Never!  I vividly remember the day school opened; it was in line of sight, at the end of our street, and I stood on the sidewalk watching all my friends troop off to Kindergarten. If my mother expected my resolve to weaken she never said a word, but I was my mother’s son and never wavered.

(I have told this story countless times, always to an amused response save one.  I was addressing a sizable audience at the Chicago-area institution which claims to have brought Kindergarten to the United States in the late 19^th century and no one even cracked a smile.  So much for good humored educators.)

A full year went by while I was spontaneously “home schooled” (a sobriquet that was not invented then); what did we do?  Read aloud.  And I still remember the stories, from Robin Hood in stilted English to Joel Chandler Harris’s B’rer Rabbit read in perfect dialect (my mother had been raised on the shores of Lake Okeechobee, 14 miles by mule-drawn buckboard from the nearest town.)   And then there was Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows (both illustrated by Sheppard, the children’s book illustrator par excellence): I could never get enough.

Too old to be read to aloud (or so I thought at 15) I would sit on the stairs to the second floor and eavesdrop as my mother read Laura Ingles Wilder to my sister, seven years my junior.

If ever a testimony to reading aloud is needed, my mother is it.  In addition to being a superb reader aloud, she was a gifted story teller as well.  She had the capacity to make them up as she went along, never losing a beat or fumbling a line or plot.  Like Penelope in the Odyssey, the stories were skillfully woven; as skillfully as the stories in books, a talent that I envy to this day.

She also told “true” stories from her childhood (and from our father’s childhood, stories that she got from him and his brothers and sisters).  We specially liked the stories from the farm in Florida, particularly ones that involved rattlesnakes and alligators, or the one about the raging bull on my father’s Indiana farm that was successfully chased away by the faithful family dog. 

We also loved what might be called “technology” stories, the first phone call, the first automobile ride, the first airplane ride, the first radio broadcast.  Born in 1910, her life spanned the modern era.  At the time, it seemed perfectly natural to ask her to tell and retell the same stories again and again.  Only as an adult did I appreciate the fact that repetition is as old as the human race. How else did Homer’s great unwritten poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, survive for hundreds of years until they were finally written down?

As all good things come to an end, my mother will be interred in Arlington Cemetery next to my father where family and friends will gather for the changing of the guard.  And as we are buoyed by their memories we are buoyed by the reality of a new addition: six hours before my mother died my nephew’s wife had a bouncing baby girl, a sign certain that life goes on.

With the commendable attempt to shift education measurement emphasis from inputs to outputs, it is easy to forget that the dismal science, economics, is a three-legged stool: inputs, throughputs and outputs. Indeed it is not unlike the Hegelian triptych of thesis, synthesis and antithesis. In particular, it is like the Hegelian formulation because the mid-step, synthesis or throughputs, is meant to be transformative.

As even amateur education historians know only too well, for 150 years inputs were the only measure policy makers used to make judgments about schools. Inputs, of course, began with dollars, included teachers and administrators and concluded with the raw material, students. (Reminding me once again of the late unlamented Governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox quote, about improving prisons: “can’t do it ‘till we get a better class of prisoner” he opined.) Inputs are what go in at the beginning of the process.

Input measurement was characterized by a compliance regime, in which inputs were counted and catalogued as a part of old-fashioned fidelity audits. So long as you spent what you got according to plan everything was fine. The routine was designed to round up the usual suspects, to catch you doing something wrong. Not until the 1990’s did this thinking begin to change in a fundamental way – measure outputs, not inputs (at least not exclusively).

What rumbles out at the end of the production line is clearly what the process is all about, and thinking about outputs is a step in the right direction. But it is too far too soon. What goes on during the production process – the conversion, even transformation – of inputs into outputs is as important. It is what researchers mean when they describe the “black box” effect. Open the black box and peer inside carefully and tentatively to find out what is going on. (Hopefully it is not the Wizard of Oz effect, all smoke and mirrors when the curtain is raised.)

This phenomenon is not limited to schools. Indeed, it characterized the private sector for years. Enter APQC, the American Productivity & Quality Center, and the brainchild of C. Jackson Grayson, Jr. Examining work flow and work processes APQC finds something of inestimable value to educators: a rich vein of in-house expertise and knowledge. (see www.apqc.org/ )

That’s the good news: resources abound right under our noses. The bad news is that few people know this and fewer still are ready to capitalize on it. The best news is that Jack Grayson and Carla O’Dell (APQC president and lead co-author with Jack of If Only we Knew What we Know) have the keys to successfully mine and exploit this: knowledge management, process improvement, best practices, benchmarking and measurement.

(The vivid imagery they open with is drawn from Arthur Clarke who noted that cave dwellers froze to death on beds of coal. If ever there was an apt image of human capital – or lack thereof -- it is this.)

O’Dell and Grayson argue that organizations are rich repositories of knowledge that must be systematically mined and used if they are to succeed. To do so, however, requires a thorough understanding of inputs, throughputs and outputs. Equally it requires a communication strategy that emphasizes three tried and true imperatives: research, network and disseminate. Which is reminiscent of the SchoolNet mantra: use data to catch you doing something right.

The APQC approach is too rich and complex to cover in one brief column; for more, of course, you will want to turn to the O’Dell and Grayson book as well as visit the web-site. And for a tantalizing introduction, tune-in to our next pod cast which features Jack Grayson himself.

Denis P. Doyle
July 25, 2006

The holy grail of school finance reform is a metric that will tell you what you’re getting in outputs for a given mix of inputs. ROI. Productivity analysis. P=I/O. The efficiency of resource allocation. Does program “x” produce “better” results than program “y?” Does teacher Smith get better results than teacher Jones?

Hardly a new idea in the private sector, an approach of this kind tends to make educators uncomfortable at best, acutely uncomfortable at worst. Education is not a business, after all. Kids are not widgets. Education is too ephemeral to be subjected to the rigidities of output measurement. As a matter of fact, only a philistine would expect to measure education results to begin with. And so on.

True enough, insofar as it goes. But it only goes so far.

Go full circle back to the dismal science, economics. What, pray tell is economics? The study of the distribution of necessarily scarce resources is what I was taught. Necessarily scarce. Never as much as you would like, certainly not as much as you deserve. Never. No matter how rich a society there is never enough available to do everything for everyone, as fully as you and they might like. Necessity rears its head. Thus, productivity studies. ROI. Different demands compete for resources – health competes with education, leisure with welfare, and police with fire suppression. The list is endless.

If education is funded without measuring results decisions are based on impulse and sentiment, a risky business that. Yet if education is to be funded on results we need a high degree of social consensus on what results are desirable (and measurable).

As it happens, this sentiment does not respect party lines. Former Minnesota DFL Senator John Brandle famously said – more than 20 years ago – “there will be more dollars for education when there is more education for the dollar.”

Conceptually, the task is straightforward: identify what value schooling adds and measure it. While most people associate the value add of schooling with academic progress, there is also a social dimension, ranging from socialization to custodial care. These too can be measured.

Take year ‘round schooling as an example. Students who attend 240 days (rather than the typical US 180-day year) are likely to escape “summer learning loss.” While preliminary evidence suggests that with poor children in particular, summer learning loss is diminished significantly with year ‘round schooling, it is an empirical question. Risk-taking school districts could offer year ‘round schooling on a pilot basis and measure what happens – who enrolls, how popular is the program, and what are the results? (One prediction: working parents will love it.)

Alternately, 13 180-day years equals 2,340 days from K to graduation. Taken in 240 day installments, a typical student could graduate in 10 rather than 13 years. This too is an empirical question. Are there answers? Certainly Japanese experience suggests that there is. The Japanese school year is 240 days long and the typical graduate (after 13 years) is reputed to have completed the equivalent of two years of a good American college.

What business or industry would close for one-third of the year? What other human capital intensive activity -- health care facility, for example --- would shut its doors one-third of the year?

The biggest irony is that with local control one would expect to see significant variations in the delivery of education, reflecting, if nothing else, local tastes and preferences, yet district after district is relentlessly the same. No where is this more true than in the length of the school year, 180 days (give or take one or two days) across the country. The practice could not be starker if Uncle Sam had ordered it by fiat.

Finally, there is the issue of old-fashioned custodial care. Schools are presently on an early 20th century agrarian calendar, reflecting the ebb and flow of cultivation and harvest. Which simply makes no sense when less than 3% of the modern workforce lives on the land. Today’s economic and demographic reality is more than 60 percent working parents with more than half single parent custodial arrangements, a day care nightmare for countless working moms and dads when school is not in session.

As former Senator Pat Moynihan said about latch-key children, a society that does not provide supervised care for its children not only invites trouble, it deserves it.

An optional 240-day school year could kill three birds with one stone: summer learning loss, more efficient use of plant and equipment and much needed custodial care for the children of working parents.

Denis P. Doyle
July 19, 2006

What goes around comes around, and once again weighted student funding (WSF) is in the spotlight. (Any idea with supporters as varied as former Education Secretaries Paige and Bennett and former NC Governor Jim Hunt and Clinton White House Advisor John Podesta can’t be all bad. See the NY Times June 27, 2006, Rod Paige, For School Equity, Try Mobility.) Indeed, its time may finally have arrived.

(Although weighted student funding has several variants, because it is in the news it is a good time to think about IT functionality that would permit tracking it. If student funding is equalized, examining other “value adds” that might account for different outcomes – teacher quality, instructional activities, curriculum, assessment – will present researchers, policy makers and practitioners with a field day.)

But first, what is weighted student funding? In its classic incarnation (as once deployed in Florida) a normal, healthy – I might add, mythical -- 10- or 12-year old generates base funding identified with a weight of "1"; all children in the system generate weighted funding in relationship to the base. For example, other normal, healthy 10- 12-year olds are all “1’s”, while a migrant student might be weighted at 1.5, an orthopedically handicapped child might generate a weight of 2.2, a blind student 3.0, a half-day Kindergartener a weight of .6, an otherwise normal high school student 1.2 and so on. (You can go on and establish weights to your heart's content -- high mobility, poverty, ESL, building needs, etc, etc. etc.)

Such a funding system passes the classic test of fiscal neutrality: equal treatment of equals, either state-wide or district-wide. It solves at one stroke the old, acrimonious arguments about appropriate funding levels (and ushers in new, acrimonious arguments); for example, legislators would now fight over weighting – who gets what weight – but in theory at least, everyone would be in favor of fair and level funding. And the only way to change overall funding would be to reallocate different weights or increase the value of the base weight. Assume the base weight is $7,500 – increase it by 10% and the value of every other weight increases as well. With weighted student funding, a rising tied floats all boats.

The piece de resistance to WSF is its “back pack” provision: the student would literally carry the dollar allocation to the public school of choice. Talk about market forces!

But there are pieces to the puzzle:

Sir Michael Barber is already a legend in the UK (where he is from); he is soon to be one here as well. The former education advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, he is now advising NYC Schools’ chancellor Joel Klein. (He is now a partner with McKinsey & Company.) His power is not a product of his charisma – though charisma he has – but his strong suit: he talks sense to the American people (just as he talked sense to the British people before, which, among other things, earned him a knighthood. To an American the knighthood may be an honorific, but as anyone who has heard him speak it was earned the old-fashioned way, hard work. For that matter, it was also earned the new-fashioned way, working smarter!)

And he practices what he preaches. He is passionate about education reform, carrying the torch across country and across the Atlantic. His address to a rapt audience of 150 educators at EduStat Summit 2006 last week was delivered on a Thursday morning in NY after taking the red-eye in from the West Coast the night before; he took the red-eye out that afternoon to London. It makes me tired to think about it. (His EduStat slides can be seen at www.edustat.com.)

His message is straightforward: he double joins theory and practice and results flow from the interaction of three major themes pursued concurrently, not sequentially:

• Hardware and infrastructure;
• The operating system (which becomes the reform model); and,
• Software, teaching and learning.

The first theme includes funding and human capital; the second theme includes market forces, performance measurement and capacity building; and the third theme is comprised of school ethos, high standards and teacher quality. Easy to say, hard to do.

Combining capacity building, performance measurement and market forces includes something for everyone. Not to put too fine a point on it, each strand taken alone embodies the point of view of powerful constituents: teachers groups argue that capacity building (more money and more professional development, for example) is the key to improvement; legislators and governor argue that accountability is the solution; while economists (of the left and right) support markets as the school reform silver bullet. Rarely are the three strands combined, and Michael Barber offers some striking results when they are.

For example, the national literacy strategy brought dramatic results in the first three years: England is now third in the world in reading among ten-year olds (Sweden and the Netherlands are first and second, the US is ninth).

While there is no hard-and-fast winning formula, there are aspects to the English experience that have a direct bearing on the US.

• Successful reform combines pressure and support;
• High standards which are centrally set but locally implemented are central to the English reform experience. Power – budgetary and academic – is in the hands of the building head: so long as the high standards are met (as revealed by national exams); and,
• Capacity building is ensured by three-year budgets, increased teacher salaries and comprehensive investment in school buildings.

One note of special importance: the English experience places the emphasis squarely where it belongs, on teaching excellence. And the English do more than pay it lip service – for an example visit www.teach.gov.uk. It will blow you away. “Although progress across the board has been significant,” Sir Michael notes in closing that:

• It took a long time
• It is still uneven
• The agenda in the media shifts
• Reform generates controversy and enemies
• Genuine transformation has only just begun
• As performance improves, expectations rise

Perhaps most important, the public is “unimpressed by ‘adequate’… they want ‘good’ and aspire to ‘great’…”

Denis P. Doyle
July 5, 2006

“What is past is prologue” is the phrase that graces the National Archives Building (unhappily, closed due to flooding yesterday, but soon to re-open one hopes.) This epigram springs to mind after the most successful EduStat Summit yet. (See www.edustat.com ) Each participant will have his or her own definition of success, of course, and mine (no less than yours) can be intensely personal. So it was this year when I had the opportunity to honor an old and dear friend, David T. Kearns.

Most everyone in the education world will remember David as the business leader who truly led the education reform movement from its infancy to maturity. As CEO and Chairman of Xerox, as early as the late 1980’s, he began to relentlessly beat the education reform drum, beginning with a speech to the Detroit Economic Club in fall 1987 calling on the nation to attend to the growing education crisis. (The speech became a book in 1988 which I was privileged to co-author, Winning the Brain Race. Re-released in updated form in 1991, its radical message about high standards, public school choice, extended day and year remains as topical today as when it was first published.)

David went on to become Deputy Secretary of Education and founder of New American Schools. But to me his greatest triumph was his battle with cancer, a fight he waged with as much tenacity -- and grace – as he had brought to the cause of school reform. So it was with special personal and professional pleasure that I had the opportunity to introduce him on the occasion of the David T. Kearns Public School CIO of the Year award, the symbolic highlight of EduStat Summit 2006.

The winner of the award was no less gratifying, Philadelphia’s own CIO, Pat Renzulli. (Selected by an independent panel from more than two dozen nominees, her name and those of the two runners-up were a closely guarded secret until the actual announcement!)

Today the CIO of the Year seems a normal enough event, but through the lens of time it is a novel one indeed. As recently as 2000, Jonathan Harber and I could find only one in the nation as a whole, in a surprisingly high-tech district in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Clovis. Today it is the rare district of any size than labors without a CIO. And many if not most of them are drawn from the ranks of the private sector, as Pat Renzulli is and Chicago’s Bob Runcie is. The importance of this phenomenon cannot be overemphasized; for the first time in modern American history there is the beginning of a regular transfusion (for that is what it is) of private sector knowledge and expertise into the nation’s largest school districts.

That is the essence of David Kearns’ vision of private sector/public sector collaboration: non-adversarial, cooperative, penetrating, effective. No social institution is so successful that it cannot profit from an infusion of outside interest and expertise, schools included. The public school CIO is a case in point.

There were, of course, other presenters at EduStat Summit 2006, almost too numerous to count. Keynotes included Tim Magner on behalf of the US DoE; Sir Michael Barber (Tony Blair’s education advisor who is the subject of next week’s Viewpoint), Walter Bender from the MIT media lab who described plans (with a scale model) of a “$100” laptop designed to reach millions of kids across the developing world; Don F. Kettl, UPenn Professor of Political Science, Alan November (who can become a stand-up comic if he decides to give up his day job); and Yvonne Chan (see www.thedoylereport.com, Viewpoint 160, A School That Works).

In addition, there were six panel discussions. No wonder a good time was had by all. And no wonder planning for EduStat Summit 2007 has already begun. (To register, contact Francesca Maso at fmaso at schoolnet.com ).

Denis P. Doyle
June 27, 2006

EduStat 2006 June 22-23, 2206 in New York is, as its name suggests, already an annual event. Only the theme changes. EduStat 2004’s theme was Brown v Board and NCLB while EduStat 2005’s was From Mass Education to Mass Customization. EduStat 2006’s is Education for a Flat World. There is evolution at work. (See www.edustat.com).

In 2004 Brown was in the air, on everyone’s lips, on the 50^th anniversary of the most important Court decision of the 20^th century. And while much remains to be done to deliver on the promise of Brown, much has been accomplished. And it was precisely NCLB – Leave no Child Behind – that was heralded as a sign and portent (the phrase NCLB had been appropriated by President Bush from Marion Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund.)

From Mass Education to Mass Customization reflected a unique meeting of education and technology – mass education was an American invention. Egalitarian and democratic with a small “d” mass education neatly paralleled the emergence of mass production. (Though the term mass education was virtually a play on words, meant to illustrate the education of the masses not necessarily applying the techniques of mass production though apply them it did.)

Mass customization is a borrowing from the world of high technology, meant to express the capacity of technology to make customization possible on a heretofore unimaginable scale. Picture a Japanese bike store where floor models are for display only and the customer sits in front of a computer and designs a bicycle of choice; made up at a factory within hours, it is shipped immediately to the purchaser. Or picture an American wheel chair manufacturer – Quickie™ -- which operates the same way: it mass produces customized wheelchairs. Or Dell computers which does the same.

Indeed, mass customization in an education setting is a dream come true, in which each student gets what he or she needs when they need it. It is the realization of a royal tutor for each student, the most enduring example of which is Philip of Macedon who hired Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander!

Education for a Flat World is the logical next step; not only is the idea of a flat world on everyone’s lips – thanks to Tom Friedman’s eponymous bestseller – it resonates with the growing sentiment that the world is growing smaller as well as flatter.

Not only do we live in a global economy we live in an environment characterized by instant telecommunications and nearly instant (as time was recently measured) travel. Compare 24 hours of transit time, door to door, from my house in Maryland to a world class hotel in Shanghai to the time it took the Founding Fathers to travel to Philadelphia. When the Declaration of Independence was being framed, transit time was measured by how fast a horse could walk.

Truth be told, modern technology makes knowledge work nearly fungible. No longer is the location of a lab or R & D facility very important; what is important is seamless communication among scientists, mathematicians, engineers and policy mavens. Indeed, talent can be concentrated by technology or concentrations of talent can be tapped by technology. How else explain the blossoming of telephone call centers in India, Utah and Ireland? Large numbers of highly literate people act as a magnet for entrepreneurs.

Similarly, modern medicine is a truly global phenomenon, with research projects around the world joining together scientists and physicians of all nationalities.

EduStat 2006 is a step in exploring these phenomena. In particular, we are concerned with the implications for both education policy and practice in a flattening world. By way of illustration, keynoter Sir Michael Barber was PM Tony Blair’s chief education advisor, recommending reforms that have a direct bearing on American education (which explains why he is an advisor to NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein.) And why EduStat 2006’s concluding speaker is Yvonne Chan, member of the CA State Board of Education, an immigrant from the PRC who has created a world class school in the poorest part of California’s San Fernando Valley.

Denis P. Doyle
June 20, 2006

The editor of the American Educator, Ruth Wattenberg, did me a great favor several weeks ago when she sent me a copy of the spring issue of the AFT quarterly.  The cover story is Background Knowledge: The Case for Content-Rich Language Arts and a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum Core for the Early Grades, featuring the work of ED Hirsch, Jr. (At $10 a year for non-AFT members, American Educator is one of the great print bargains of all time.  See www.aft.org/pubs-reports.)

Ruth may have remembered the high regard in which I hold Hirsch or it may have been just a shot in the dark – whatever, I am in her debt because the cover story theme is compelling and deserves revisiting, particularly in a world awash in technology in search of content. 

Hirsch’s main point is simplicity itself – reading is not a disembodied skill any more than “riding” is – just as you ride something – a bike, a horse, a mule – you read something -- a work of fiction, poetry, a map, directions, a technical manual.  True, there are decoding skills that are common to each activity, but reading with facility and pleasure requires background knowledge, typically cast as vocabulary.  (Indeed, so-called aptitude tests actively exploit this phenomenon – the fewer people who know a given word the greater its power to discriminate, the more who know it the less its power to discriminate.  Thus a spelling bee special like phthisis, an archaic word for TB, separates initiates from non-initiates.)

This phenomenon was brought home to Hirsh long before he started his Core Knowledge Foundation when as a young professor he had an epiphany.  He discovered that American students reading a passage about an American wedding had almost perfect recall when quizzed about what they had read, but very poor recall when the passage they had read was about an Indian wedding.  Indian students performed the same way.

The old saw “familiarity breeds contempt” has no relevance when it comes to reading comprehension; to the contrary, familiarity is the foundation of successful reading.

Another vivid example offered by Hirsch is the case of chess masters who can remember the placement of pieces throughout a match (indeed, they can remember placement across multiple matches over time).  What they cannot remember is the placement of pieces on a board deliberately set up at random.  Patterns are everything.

The policy and practice implications of these insights are profound.  The background knowledge of “educated” people is the building blocks and cement of civil society.  Just so the arcane and specialized knowledge of the learned professions. As a people we need shared knowledge – Lincoln’s First Inaugural, Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, the 10^th Federalist, The Declaration of Independence – to tap just the surface. We also need shared knowledge of common languages – English, mathematics – and we would all profit if second language mastery were taken for granted.

One of the major jobs of schooling is to unlock the secrets of the larger society. The long and short of it is this: content is king.

This old bromide was brought home forcefully when I recently broke down and bought a liquid plasma HDTV (on sale) because I was dazzled by the technology.  I had visions of splendid television.  Indeed, the technology does not disappoint:  everything I see on it is brilliant, captivating, mesmerizing in hi-def living color – that’s the good news.  The bad news is that there is so little worth watching (other than sports which is unparalleled). (To my astonishment most of the ads are still in old fashioned lo-def format).

What is worth watching is non-broadcast content, DVD’s from classics to new releases.  There is a lesson in this for schools – beware Greeks bearing gifts.  In this context, beware content sellers who require you to buy their content containers.  If my hi-def TV only played what commercial TV serves up, it would be a total waste of money. Newton Minnow’s  famous 1961 speech is still right: TV is a vast wasteland.  Would that it were as good as the technology.

Denis P. Doyle
June 14, 2006

One of the most remarkable publications in American education sails proudly on though it is virtually unsung and almost unnoticed except among a small coterie of cognoscenti: The Concord Review. It is time once again to sing its praises and bring it to the attention of the larger audience it so richly deserves.

What is TCR? It is a quarterly created to “recognize and to publish exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world.”

Started in 1987 by a gifted teacher, Will Fitzhugh, its circulation hovers at a very small number, yet it could not be more important. I was reminded of this when the mailman brought the 66th issue this morning, which proudly proclaims “The Concord Review remains the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students.”

If ever you needed evidence that high school students are capable of high quality, demanding work, here it is, in spades. As the web site notes, “726 research papers (average 5,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography) have been published from authors in forty-four states and thirty-three other countries” over the life of TCR. What an accomplishment. (Not to mention the list of selective colleges the authors later attended. Indeed, many if not all of the published authors include a copy of their article in their college applications.)

But what is more important than the numbers is the simple celebration of intellectual excellence TCR represents. As a professional writer, I may place more stock in writing that it deserves (but I doubt it). Indeed, the case for writing has never been stronger; not only does speech and the written word distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom, the ability to effectively communicate is the sine qua non of the emerging “flat world.” (One of the first examples of successful outsourcing was call centers in other English speaking countries.)

Admittedly it is a long stretch from call centers to academic research, just as the difference between professional sports and leisure sports is. It is the spectrum that is important, containing both ends of the tails of distribution. And even if not all of us can write moving research essays, we can all read them and learn from them. The intellectual example they set is precisely analogous to the example of high performance in other areas.

Great writing requires great audiences Walt Whitman opined. He was right.

Unhappily, the problems of scale are so large and so daunting that people are often at a loss as what to do to improve education – my modest suggestion for one small but important step is to order a subscription or subscriptions of TCR for a student, class or school library. It will not only make you fell good, it will actually do good.

I make this suggestion without embarrassment; TCR is a non-profit that survives on income from subscriptions and needs fiscal as well as moral support. If talk is cheap, the written word – particularly when it is printed in journal format – is expensive. And I can think of no more deserving activity than an academic quarterly of TCR’s quality. Put simply, it sends a message. The right one!

Visit The Concord Review web site at www.tcr.org to learn more about this marvelous Quarterly. You may submit a manuscript for consideration to the Editorial Offices, TCR, 730 Boston Post Road Suite 21, Sudbury MA 01776 (800-331-5007). You can subscribe (with payment of $40 in advance) by contacting TCR Subscriptions, Box 476, Canton MA 021021-0476

Denis P. Doyle
June 5, 2006
Issue 6.23, no 161

Yvonne Chan is an educator par excellence, a force of nature, a ball of fire, a human dynamo. The descriptors fall trippingly off the tongue. To meet Yvonne is to be overwhelmed by her warmth, her energy, her enthusiasm and her vision. Indeed, the only important question about Yvonne is can she be replicated or is she one of a kind?

(That, at least, is the question management guru Peter Drucker would have posed. To Drucker, the irreplaceable manager represents a crucial mistake because by definition, his or her work cannot be continued. The greatest managers are those who leave in place a legacy that can be fulfilled by ordinary folks. But I’m getting ahead of the story.)

Yvonne’s story is important because it is a story of success against the odds, personal, professional and political. Born in mainland China – the PRC – as a teenager she made her way to Hong Kong where she distinguished herself as a student at the Catholic Convent School; upon graduation, the nuns arranged a scholarship for college in Montana. Her mother sent her off by slow boat to San Francisco (19 days) with a parting gift of exotic Chinese herbs to sell in China Town to capitalize her start in America.

Deciding to forgo the pleasures of Montana winters, Yvonne made her way to the San Joaquin Valley where she picked grapes until she was able to enroll in Fresno Community College. Eventually she made her way south transferring to UCLA where she majored in French and Spanish for her AB, then an MA at Northridge State in special education and a UCLA post doc in computer science. Not content with these degrees, Yvonne concurrently earned certification in Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese!

I learned about Yvonne when I served as a board member of the RJR/Nabisco Next Century Schools program; Yvonne submitted a proposal for an award on behalf of her school, Vaughn Street Learning Center and won $325,000 hands-down. More than a decade ago, we were overwhelmed by her audacity; today we stand in awe of her accomplishments.

Indeed, the RJR/Nabisco award was just the first of many, including the prestigious Milken Educator Award and the McGraw-Hill Educator of the Year Award (not to be outdone, she also won the Los Angeles Dodgers Education Hero in Service.)

Yvonne’s great triumph is her school, the Vaughn Street Next Century Learning Center – begun as a small start-up more than a decade ago in an impoverished part of the San Fernando Valley – Pacoima – it now enrolls 1,800 children from pre-K to a new high school. It is 100% percent free lunch and ninety-eight percent Hispanic. Students wear uniforms and by the time they reach seventh grade they are able to enroll in a serious program of Chinese language study ( I know of only one other program with intensive Chinese study on such a scale, Sidwell Friends in Washington DC, Chelsea Clinton’s alma mater.) As a charter school, it is a tub on its own bottom, in but not under LAUSD. Free of bureaucratic constraints, she has been free to innovate, to reach for the stars.

Visiting Yvonne’s school not long ago, I was dazzled by its simplicity, neatness and openness; indeed, it reminded me of nothing so much as Chinese schools Yvonne and I had visited in Shanghai in early December.

Everyone who knows Yvonne has a favorite story about her intrepidity and derring do. Mine has to do with her response to an abandoned house on the edge of the school grounds. It was a crack-dealers magnet. Repeated calls to LAPD elicited a desultory police drive-by scattering dealers and junkies for a few hours. Then business as usual. Yvonne’s response was not business as usual. Using charter school funds she purchased the crack house for back taxes, hired a bull-dozer, and threw a demolition derby, inviting parents and students to join her in knocking it down. They did and the dealers and junkies are gone with a new playground in their place.

The jury is still out: can Yvonne Chan be replicated or did they throw away the mold? In light of her talent and energy it is tempting to think she’s one of a kind; for the sake of our children and grandchildren, let’s hope she’s one of many.

Denis P. Doyle
May 31, 2006

Recuperating from total hip replacement surgery, I’m struck once again with the similarities – and dissimilarities -- between medicine and education. Both undertakings are a mix of art and science – in different proportions to be sure – but just as medicine is much more than science, education is much less. Why? The “science” of medicine is more mature. But particularly from the patient’s perspective, the art of medicine is no less important.

Consider patient care – no one looms larger in the medical world than the surgeon. He or she is endowed with almost superhuman powers – from a psychological, even anthropological, perspective it is no wonder. By submitting to surgery patients not only relinquish control of their bodies, they relinquish control of their very being, their consciousness. But if the surgeon is at the top of the medical pyramid -- read Superintendent or principal in a school setting – the real care-giver, the person the patient both relies upon and sees most often is the nurse. Indeed, so long as the surgeon does the job correctly, he or she is no longer necessary.

Interestingly, it is the less skilled labor the patient thrives upon – the solace provided by a caring nurse is of inestimable value. It is her (typically “her”) cool, calm presence that reassures and speeds recovery.

In drawing out this extended metaphor, the role of the family cannot be overestimated in hospital, school or home. Just as the family is the source of “social capital” – the social resources that are an integral part of human capital in school -- social capital lies at the center of healing. For my case, there was an embarrassment of riches; in addition to my wife, my son and sister-in-law came for the actual surgery and first days of recovery; my daughter for the first days of out of hospital recuperation, and my sister – all the way from Merrie Old England -- for the heavy lifting of home-bound recuperation.

Each played a role the importance of which cannot be overemphasized. Indeed, who is to say that a quite moment with a loved one is not more restorative than all the medicine in the world?

Not to be forgotten in the crush is the role of friends – second only to family, the cards, letters, visits, meals, phone calls are all a part of recovery. If that sounds like a lot of support it is! And wonderful support at that. Indeed, it is a sobering reminder of how frail we are without a support network.

What is the relevance of this to schooling? It is precisely analogous. My children had and my grandchildren have a school support network that is structured precisely as my formal and informal health network is: true enough there are experts at the top, but the real support is the broad base made up largely of family and friends. For example, the vocabulary children bring with them to school is the creation of years of interacting with family and friends, just as their musical and artistic interests are. Most importantly, the fount of creativity and curiosity they bring is “found” (and hopefully nurtured) by the school, not created by it.

Pat Moynihan, sociologist extraordinaire, and former US Senator, years ago observed that children raised in poverty were doubly disadvantaged – worse even than the material deprivation was the absence of intellectual enrichment. Raised in isolation – rural back-waters or urban projects -- by mothers (without men) who were too often eighth grade drop-outs, the language they acquired left them stunted from the beginning.

Later Moynihan was to write about the plight of latch-key children and he concluded by saying that a nation that leaves large numbers of children without adult supervision not only invites trouble, it deserves it.

One is reminded of the late unlamented GA governor, Lester Maddox, who, when asked how he was going to improve the state prisons, replied that he couldn’t do anything until he got a better class of prisoner.

Schools like hospitals (and prisons for that matter) must deal with who ever present themselves for service; moms and dads are not sequestering their best and brightest. To that end they need to offer a “social capital” rich environment, one that makes up for what impoverished homes are unable to offer.

Is there a model of such an offering? I visited one not long ago, Yvonne Chan’s Vaughn Street Next Century Learning Center in LA. More on that next week.

Denis P Doyle
May 24, 2006

I write and speak about a medical model for education so often that the rhetoric begins to blur.  But the chickens are coming home to roost. Or to further mangle a metaphor, nothing so focuses a man’s mind as the imminent prospect of total hip replacement surgery (with a titanium prostheses).  Which prospect I face Monday May 8, 2006 at 12:30 pm (but who’s counting?)

The medical model of education is quite straightforward, in my mind at least: the object of medicine is to maintain or restore health.  The object of education is to increase useful knowledge. To that end, the process embodies a number of well-defined steps:  examination, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, adjusting treatment, and continuation of monitoring.  The preferred outcome is wellness; the alternative is burying your mistakes.  Just so in education: the preferred outcome is acquisition of knowledge, the alternative is dropping out.

One thing that is reassuring about the medical model is that it is no accident that medicine is a young science – after thousands of years as an art (often an occult art) the transition to science was (and is) halting.  Indeed, just like education, the scientific basis of medicine is still in its infancy although thanks to anesthesia and antibiotics medicine dazzles with specific successes.  Appendectomies are a case in point: with access to modern hospitals, successful diagnosis leads to successful treatment in a spectacularly high proportion of cases.   Would that reading instruction were so easy.  But there is a dirty little secret about appendectomies: there is no widely accepted theory as to the cause of appendicitis, which means there is no way to prevent it before its onset.  Cure it yes, prevent it no.

And there is so much that remains to be done that one hardly knows where to begin except with the obvious example of cancer.  The billions of dollars spent on cancer treatment and research have barely moved the needle.  True, the breakthrough we are all waiting for may be just around the corner, but that is likely to be due as much to accident as design.

Which brings me back to total hip replacement – as it turns out, it is a lot like auto-body shop.  Lots of mechanical sawing and hammering with ample opportunity for infection and pain.  Thank God for anesthesia and antibiotics.  (It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that germ theory of infection became known let alone accepted.  As a consequence, surgeons did not bother to disinfect either the wound site or scalpels.  No wonder they could say, as Joseph Lister’s contemporaries were wont to, “the surgery was a success but the patient died.”)  

There is one other big difference, the product of accident not design: the miracle metal, titanium.  Not only is it inert in the body – as is gold, platinum and stainless steel -- it is the only substance known to which bone bonds spontaneously.  Which makes it the preferred material for joint replacement.

The researcher who discovered this property did so by accident in 1952.  Studying rabbit hard tissue, he hurriedly left his microscope for several days with out cleaning it.  Upon his return he made a most startling finding; what looked like dried blood on the titanium slide clip was actually rabbit bone cells which had spontaneously bonded.  Half a century later why titanium has nearly magical bio-medical properties remains a mystery.  (Which is probably as good a definition of magic as any.)

The lessons for education are embodied in two seemingly contradictory messages: push the scientific envelop as far and as fast as you can and continue trial and error approaches.  Deliberately combine science and art.

Critical to this process is keeping track of what goes on in the classroom and the school. If you know what works so much the better; if you know why what works, better yet.  But ignorance of cause and effect should never get in the way of success.

Denis P. Doyle
May 3, 2006

With the Grand Vision sketched in, the next big question is build or buy? Not long ago this was a serious question in for-profit firms, many of which created IT departments whose task it became to re-invent the IT wheel. But the brutal reality of designing, building and maintaining home-made systems was a wake-up call. Surprisingly, a number of school districts – particularly large ones – think that they can and should build data systems of their own, just as their predecessors in the private sector did before them. (This is not to be confused with customization; some customization is frequently desirable, even necessary. Nor should it be confused with abandoning IT analytic capacity: discerning and knowledgeable people are always an asset.)

Indeed, in the manufacturing economy of yore, vertical integration (as it was called) was prized – the classic example was Henry Ford’s River Rouge Plant. Iron ore went in one end, finished Fords rolled out the other. By way of contrast lift the lid of your computer and you will see that it is not only a “world” machine – sourced from many countries – the brand it bears reflects design and assembly capabilities not original manufacture. Some companies even advertise what used to be thought of as an anomaly. The distinguished British high fidelity firm NAD, for example, was a leader in the field when it announced, “Designed in Britain, assembled in China.”

The issue is straightforward. No single institution can do it all, least of all schools. As it is, a medium size school district is as demanding to run as a Greek City State and the last skill-set called for is IT design and production. IT specification is another matter altogether, but that is a task that goes well beyond IT staff. As Clemenceau famously said about war, IT is too important to be left to technologists.

The short answer to the question “build or buy,” then is: buy. There are data service providers out there who know what they are doing in ways that schools neither do nor should (any more than a car driver needs to know the intricacies of the internal combustion engine or a lap top user needs to know how to program a computer.)

But buying is not without its problems and pitfalls.

According to Aristotle, three kinds of people go to the Olympic Games: those who go to compete, those who go to buy and sell, and those who go to watch. Not surprisingly, in Aristotle’s hierarchy of values, those who go to watch are highest on the totem pole (to mix new and old world metaphors).

If those of us who buy and sell are not among Aristotle’s exalted, we still have serious business to conduct. And the world of ITcould not be more serious. Among other things it is intellectually and administratively powerful and, at least up front, expensive. Indeed, ITpurchases can be expensive in two ways; financially expensive, even if the decision-making process goes well, and politically expensive if it goes badly. It should also be noted that if the decision making process goes well, ITacquisitions are intellectually and politically profitable. Better outcomes are the promise of ITand should be celebrated when they occur.

Nonetheless if ITholds out enormous hope for school reform it is also the source of serious anxiety for many school people and vendors. Typically, each is a mystery to the other. Vendors know that schools need ITand schools know they need IT, but often as not each is bewildered by ITclaims and counter-claims and school needs, real and imagined. The variety of products and services is so vast – and so complex and arcane – that normal people may begin to blither at the vendor’s blather (and vice versa).

In part the problem is due to pure technical complexity; in the best of circumstances, ITis hard for non-technical clients to understand what is being offered, how it works, and what it costs. In part the problem is due to the fact that a good deal of the software on the market is repurposed business or military software that may or may not fit school needs and knowledge.

From the vendor’s perspective, it is often difficult to know precisely what schools need and want and, to use the jargon of the trade, what their capacity is. Making informed judgments in new fields can be very dicey.

For the customer it is often difficult to know what is needed and what is available. To use the jargon of the trade, what is real ITand what is vapor ware? The Superintendent’s worst fear (second even to calling a snow-day wrong) is making a major purchasing decision and ending up with a costly system that doesn’t work.

How to buy – even more than what to buy – is the problem.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 6.17, 2006
Send comments to info AT thedoylereport.com
April 25, 2006

Learning from student assessment results is easier said than done.  Compelling, timely and accurate analysis is the key.  And the necessary precondition to turning the key is data that is accessible, useful, accurate and easily managed.  Districts without data management partnerships are left to their own devices and often founder; those that develop data management partnerships can get ahead of the curve.

To put the reader at ease, what follows is generic and not proprietary – this is not a commercial message.  The essay tries to lay out data storage and retrieval needs and necessary data manipulation capabilities within an assessment context.  In theory, at least, these objectives could be accomplished by Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, working on a three-legged stool wearing a green eye-shade and holding a quill pen; in practice, however, IT  (information technology) is essential; as a practical matter, all student data – including assessment data -- must be accessible through high speed, web-enabled IT.

The fact is, the modern school district is positively awash in data – the problem is to rationalize its storage and access, a task for which modern IT is ideally suited.

By way of illustration, student assessment results only make sense if they are explicitly linked to standards, curriculum and instructional practices, which themselves produce countless data points.  At the same time speed is of the essence –for example, the best and most useful assessments are those that are embedded in instruction and provide instantaneous feedback. (Image the tennis coach who tells you she sees what’s wrong with your backhand but won’t tell you what it is for 90 days.)

Equally important,  student assessment information must be linked to student demographic information – to use a military metaphor, name, rank and serial number must be linked to performance indicators.

In addition, the lion’s share of this voluminous data base must be kept in confidence, something IT is ideally suited to do.  While secure log-on and pass word protections are not infallible, they offer much greater security than pen and paper records stored in file folders.

And although the data must be secure it must also be readily available – over the WEB – to parents and students.

Finally, one word cannot be stressed enough: partnership.  More than two decades ago, at the height of the adopt-a-school movement, then New York City Schools Chancellor Frank Maciarola made a telling point; his schools weren’t orphaned and they didn’t need to be adopted, he announced.  What they needed was partnerships, with each side bringing something of value to the table.

There are three dimensions then to the puzzle of forming external partnerships to improve assessment:

• A grand vision – why data is important and why a data management partner is  equally important;
• The personnel, knowledge and confidence to choose your partner; and
• The appropriate instruments to implement the partnership.

Borrowing from strategic planning, you create your grand vision by answering a few deceptively simple questions: where are you now, where do you want to be, how do you plan to get there and how will you know when you’ve arrived?  In the  narrower context of learning from student assessment, what data do you possess, what additional data do you need, how will you get it, and how will you know it when you’ve got what you need?

These are the four questions that lie at the heart of any strategic planning exercise: together they are the elements with which a grand vision is crafted.  The act of asking them is an exercise worth doing in its own right; answering them is imperative for long-term organizational health and well-being.  Asking them and answering them in the narrow context of assessment is important as well.  What do you want to assess and how will you measure it?  Teacher effectiveness?  Program impact?  Curricular impact?  Student behavior?

Is one reading series more effective with some youngsters than others?  What impact does regular benchmark testing have on high stakes scores?  Does one professional development program have a greater impact than another?  What effect does tutoring have on struggling students?  On AP students?

What these and similar questions bring out is the need to establish a temporal benchmark, with a clear exposition of precisely where the district – and schools and students within it – stand.  Today.

The next step is to identify where the district wants to be in “x” years (1, 5 and 10 years, for example). 

Choosing the route is the acid test; so too is knowing when you’ve reached your goal.  Both are exercises in assessment.

The father of management science, Peter Drucker, had a famous admonition with a special bearing on implementing the grand vision: optimize don’t maximize.  Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.  He who would be all things to all men does nothing well.  A jack of all trades is truly a master of none.

With the Grand Vision sketched in, the next big question is build or buy?  That’s the subject of next week’s View Point.

Denis P. Doyle
April 20, 2006
Issue 6.16

Who would have guessed three years ago -- when the bloom was on the NCLB rose -- that it would today need spirited defenders, people who see beyond the partisan rhetoric? As it turns out, because NCLB set its sights so high it now needs all the friends it can get. And not policy wonks, but practitioners who know whereof they speak.

Paul Kimmelman is just the person to offer a spirited defense of NCLB. His new book makes the case with clarity and dispatch. (Implementing NCLB: Creating a Knowledge Framework to Support School Improvement. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press, 2006. In the interests of full disclosure, I wrote the forward from which this View Point is taken.)

A former school superintendent now at Learning Point in Illinois, he has been deeply involved in school improvement throughout his career. Indeed, Paul has served not just the districts in which he worked, but the nation as a whole, first as president of the First in the World Consortium, then as a member of the TIMSS-R Technical Review panel and more recently as a member of the Glenn Commission (National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching). He has the grounding of a practitioner with the perspective of a policy maven. His view is simultaneously on the ground and 30,000 feet. All at the same time.

And perhaps more to the point, Paul’s defense of NCLB is not defensive but generous. A friendly critic, Paul first sets NCLB in its historical context. He argues that NCLB is not only conceptually correct, but worth reforming to smooth out the rough spots. That’s tough love.

This, his latest book, is he says, “an attempt to be a useful guide for understanding how NCLB became a law and most importantly, building organizational capacity to implement school improvement to comply with it.” He focuses on building organizational capacity to avoid repeating mistakes of the past and to help educators understand the process of reform “to prevent more policy mandates in the future.” To do so, he encourages practitioners to “recognize the importance of acquiring, managing and implementing knowledge to inform decision making.”

This is a tall order, particularly when many educators are notoriously averse to data-driven decision-making. In fairness, it must be said that there is a reason for this aversion; historically, education data was something a third party required you to gather (about yourself) to embarrass you with 90 to 120 days later. Or so it seemed. But when data is used diagnostically – and to celebrate success as well as pinpoint problems – it is no longer a game of Gotcha! As Montgomery Country MD Superintendent Jerry D. Weast says, today he uses data to catch you doing something right! That, indeed, is the promise of systematic knowledge acquisition, management and implementation. And it is made possible by modern IT, which puts data in the hands of users in real-time.

Finally, more important even than making the ethical – even moral – case on behalf of NCLB, Paul Kimmelman makes the pragmatic case for implementation, arguing as it were that practice is policy. Do NCLB right and schooling in America will be transformed. A welcome lesson for policy wonks like myself, it is nonetheless a hard lesson for many main-line educators who have seen reforms come and go. Skeptical by temperament (and made more so by experience) many teachers have seen it all and characteristically respond with the admonition, this too shall pass. Kimmelman’s strongest suit is that he speaks from hard-won experience in the trenches. He is one of their own, talking the talk because he’s walked the walk.

Robert Gordon (Senator Kerry’s education advisor on the presidential campaign trail) in a New Republic piece argues that Democrats should stop dithering about NCLB, pull up their socks, and support its purposes wholeheartedly. Kimmelman should give the doubting Thomases among us the sure knowledge that where there is the will there is the way.

This is a must-read book, then, for anyone who cares about NCLB. By owning up to the difficulty of implementation – and proffering real ideas for meeting NCLB’s challenges -- it provides the armature for essential reform and improvement efforts. And it reminds us of the power of the old political adage: take care that the best does not become the enemy of the good.

Denis P. Doyle
Chevy Chase MD
April 11, 2006

So far the academic performance requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have been in the spotlight. Embedded in the law, however, are provisions designed to inform and involve parents which should emerge as NPLB: No Parent Left Behind. NPLB would enlarge the promise of NCLB by making schools and parents true partners.

The law of the land provides new opportunities and responsibilities to involve parents as rightful partners in school and district improvement. And parent involvement is already being strengthened by the culture shift caused by WEB use. Today’s consumers expect to have information available with the click of a mouse. The explosive growth of Amazon.com and eBay are matched by the transformation of the news media brought about by blogging and pod-casting. Particularly as “parent portals” roll out, schools will be transformed as well.

What do we mean by parent portals? Internet access to information about students, teachers and schools. The transparency that NCLB requires, and the migration of education information to the WEB, will give parents unprecedented access to information about their children’s academic performance and their schools (as well as other schools). And it will give everybody – parents, activists, real estate brokers, print and electronic reporters -- unprecedented access to information about school and student performance.

But more is at stake than transparency – that’s a necessary but not sufficient requirement. Knowing what’s going on is essential, but equally critical is knowing what to do with that knowledge. NPLB, then, means that we need to have meaningful, two-way communication and collaboration between parents and schools, as well as access to resources including both on-line and in-person professional development. Parents need as much help as teachers and administrators in diagnosing and addressing student learning needs.

Three elements are particularly critical for effective parent involvement. As Los Angeles contemplates the future of its school district, the importance of these elements will be magnified locally.

There has been a spate of articles about a recent report that finds that in many low achieving schools the curriculum is being narrowed in response to NCLB. (See Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math, Sam Dillon, NY Times, March 26, 2006.) To my astonishment, the report was met by cries of grief and lamentation as well as praise. The praise was understandable – finally emphasis where it belongs, on what the now defunct Council for Basic Education called the generative subjects, reading and math. From mastery of these two subjects everything else flows; without them, schooling is ashes in the mouth.

Granted, a substantive lament about curricular narrowing is understandable – history, foreign language, economics, art, gone! What is to become of us without a liberal education? But were these subjects not “gone” already in the world of curricular “broadness” if reading and math were not successfully taught? How much history can a non-reader master? How much algebra can a student learn who hasn’t mastered his sums? Can a student learn a second language without a first language?

Let there be no mistake: my immediate response -- “it’s about time” -- was meant deliberately as a double entendre. First, it’s about time that low achievers focus, focus, focus. Let them run the risk or narrowness (As Edmund Burke said about the study of law, it sharpens the mind by narrowing it.) All students must learn to read fluently, with facility and pleasure, and they must learn mathematics through algebra if they are to be successful in the work force of the 21st century.

I should point out that the argument about learning to read and do math is not purely instrumental – there is more to life than education for work. There is also education for citizenship and self-fulfillment. But these too require reading and math mastery.

The other reason that narrowing the curriculum for low achievers is “about time” is straightforward: there isn’t time enough in the regular school day and school year to teach all that modern students must learn, whether they are high or low achievers. That is what the lament about curricular narrowing should be about.

Narrowing the curriculum simply recognizes that there are academic priorities. First thing first. This is not to say that there is no room for evidence-based decision-making. Indeed, if it can be shown that two or three periods of reading instruction, followed by two periods of math is not as productive as alternating reading instruction with art, music or history so much the better. But that is not the same as saying that reading and math mastery are not the sine qua non of education.

And if all there is time for is reading and math instruction, so be it. The curriculum can be re-enlarged after students have mastered the basics.

Finally, it has become fashionable to assert that there is something mindless about repetition, drill and practice, as if they were reflections of an antediluvian form of education. And that too much emphasis on reading and math are examples par excellence of such benighted practices. A twist on the old saw that all work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

This is an example of what George Will rather elegantly labeled the fallacy of the false alternative. It is not a matter of either or, either drill and practice or creativity and innovation. In effective teaching and learning environments it is a matter of both, drill and practice and creativity. Sports are more than a metaphor; they offer a living example of teaching and learning at its best. Michael Jordan practicing free throws or Tiger Woods practicing his drive comes to mind; no matter that each was the best at what he does. Jordan and Woods are great because they understand that they were not too good to practice.

Denis P. Doyle
March 29, 2006

The Doyle Report - the weekly e-newsletter before you – is going high tech. Not only are we podcasting the weekly View Point, we are beginning a podcast series of occasional pieces of special interest to our audience. (Our first podcast was about the National Technology Plan which you can download directly from www.schoolnet.com or subscribe to from iTunes. Other podcasts are archived on the site.)

With our occasional podcasts we not only bring you the latest in news and views from the frontlines of education technology, practice and policy, we do so with brisk and timely interviews with the people who make education improvement and technology decisions before they make the headlines.

The subject of next week’s podcast (which will be available March 27, 2006) is IMS (Instructional Management Solutions).

What is an IMS? Depending on your point of view, it is either or both Instructional Management Solutions or Instructional Management Systems. The key words, of course, are instructional management.

For our purposes an IMS is a Web-enabled, content-neutral, end-to-end solution that handles the mass of data central to modern schooling, ranging from student demographics to longitudinal records to formative and high stakes test scores. It is designed to make the delivery of instruction and assessment as close to real time as possible. And while an IMS can be used for accountability purposes, it is first and foremost a diagnostic system. Indeed, accountability without diagnosis is an empty reed, all threat and no promise.

That’s a mouthful, and our guests help us unbundle the concepts embedded in this working definition.

Our guests for the March 27, 2006 IMS podcast are:

• Geoff Fletcher of T.H.E Institute (Publisher of T.H.E. Journal)
• Jeff Wayman, Professor of Education at UT Austin; and,
• Sharnell Jackson, Chief Officer of e-Learning for the Chicago Public Schools.

Each brings a unique and valuable perspective to bear.

Geoff Fletcher is a 15-year veteran of the Texas Education Agency (then in Austin, now domiciled in Bainbridge Island WA) who is an independent education writer and analyst with a strong interest in IMS; indeed, he is currently immersed in a White Paper on the subject which will be made available on our Web-site as soon as it is completed.

The other Jeff (spelled with a “J”), formerly at Johns Hopkins at the Center for Social Organization of Schools, is now in Austin where he has recently joined the faculty and is a professor at UT Austin.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must report that Sharnell Jackson is Chief Officer of e-Leaning for my alma mater, the Chicago Public Schools, a district which, as an alumnus, I hold in the fondest regard. Sharnell speaks with the authority of the seasoned administrator in one of the nation’s biggest school districts. (Chicago is home to one of my favorite bits of education trivia; the co-founder of the Council of Great City Schools is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father-in-law, former president of the Chicago School Board when I was a student: Sergeant Shriver!)

Each of our three guests brings a special point of view to the issues raised by IMS: Geoff Fletcher the analyst’s, Jeff Wayman the scholar/researcher’s, and Sharnell Jackson the savvy practitioner’s. Each illuminates this important subject and paves the way for increased understanding of an emerging subject of great interest to educators across the nation.

Join us Monday March 27^th for the IMS podcast, or enjoy it like a true techie, asynchronously, at a time and place most convenient for your busy schedule. Download it and listen to it at your pleasure. However you hear it, thanks to our three guests, we are confident that this podcast will enlarge your understanding of one of the key topics of the day.

March 20, 2006

Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards, by Kevin R. Kosar (Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder 2005) is a sign certain that a tectonic shift in education policy has occurred at the federal level. Put slightly differently, when the federal politics of education standards warrants upper-case treatment, it has come of age. Whether it has come of age with a bang or a whimper is the subject of Kosar’s eminently readable book.

An analyst in the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress, Kosar is uniquely positioned on the intellectual and factual high ground; he is master of all he surveys. (Kosar is not employed as an education analyst and as a consequence is free to write without prior clearance about the politics of education as the spirit and facts move him). As he points out, over the past decade and one half, “presidents from two parties, supported by parents and civic leaders, have tried – and generally failed – to increase student achievement through federal policymaking.” He goes on to observe that “supposedly pathbreaking legislation to “leave no child behind” has hardly made a dent in the problem.”

Kosar is not a spoiler. To the contrary, he is an analyst of an idea that he holds dear: he makes a strong case for “vigorous federal action to raise standards” and then describes what has gone wrong, a provocative subject that.

Kosar’s theme is that the feds talk tough but deliver little, that politics trumps smart policy, that liberals got what they wanted from NCLB (more money) and conservatives got what they wanted (local control still reins supreme). What didn’t happen was as important as what did; the federal government required states to adopt standards, but not federal standards. “High standards were once again left behind,” Kosar writes in his introduction.

Kosar does the busy reader a special favor with a detailed description of the book’s organization in the Introduction, permitting the non-historian and non-policy wonk t0 cut directly to the chase. For example his third chapter, Education Policy and Politics Before 1993, sets the stage clearly and well, capturing the split personality that has characterized the federal role from the beginning -- illuminating his analysis of NCLB as well as his recommendations for change in his concluding chapter, Improving Federal Standards Policy.

Kosar’s study is fully indexed, end-noted and documented (the bibliography is a comprehensive 25 pages and he includes more than 800 endnotes, enough to satisfy the most demanding scholar/reader. He even includes a page and one-half of acronyms and their meanings!)

A few issues Kosar leaves to the reader’s imagination: one is whether NCLB leads or follows. Does it set the terms of public discourse or simply mirror what is already under way? The answer, of course, is “a little of both,” depending on where you stand. Another issue is absorption with closing the racial gap in academic achievement; is this one more logical step in the civil rights movement? Another issue (of interest to political scientists at least) is Republicans requiring states and school districts to march to a federal drummer; just the prospect of such an event is so startling as to cause a double take amongst all but the most jaded observers of the passing scene.

By providing an authoritative history of the federal role in education, Kosar serves the debate about the Federal education role well. By providing realistic policy prescriptions at the book’s end he reminds us that in spite of political pressures to the contrary, incremental change is both desirable and possible.

Indeed a federal role in education is a subject as old as the Republic and is one that will not go away; given the importance of education to the nation’s well being, it is clear that it should not go away. Kosar’s book, Failing Grade, gets much more than a passing grade itself; it is the standard by which subsequent books about the federal role will be judged.

Denis P. Doyle
March 14, 2006

Monday morning arrived and after reading my e-mail I looked at my calendar to see what was in store for me.  To my shock and dismay I discovered that in a moment of weakness (or indecision) I had registered for four multi-day conferences, all in the Washington DC area, and all overlapping.  Was it possible that there were four worthwhile conferences in the same city in the same week?  What might I learn and what would the hundreds of participants get out of them?  At a deeper level, what was their existential purpose and why were they almost without exception so exhausting?

In this connection two observations floated to the surface of my memory bank, first and most famously Edna St. Vincent Millay’s splendid poem:

I burn my candle at both ends
It will not last the night
But Oh my friends and Oh my foes
It casts a lovely light

That’s the way I feel after one good conference let alone several.

And from the poetic to the practical, I was reminded of a private conversation I had with Al Shanker two decades ago, in which he laconically observed that one of the reasons teacher unions were so popular was that they gave teachers something to do with other like-minded adults.  Life after teaching.  Just so: membership organizations give people the opportunity to get together and share war stories.

Indeed, the issues before the conferees are frequently less important than the fact of meeting and conferring with friends and colleagues, old and new. (There’s a down-side to this as well as an up-side.  I’m reminded of a dreadful conference I attended several years ago in Providence RI where I ran into a long lost friend.   We adjourned to the bar immediately and began to commiserate: how boring the luncheon speaker was, how insipid the breakout sessions, how puerile the demonstrations.  And so on. It took us a full ten minutes to discover that we were attending different conferences in the same hotel).

But a good conference is a work of art, in two senses.   First, it is choreographed to form a seamless web of information gathering and exchange in a setting conducive to the enterprise.  That’s why conference organizers and hoteliers must be good at what they do.  A single blip or blemish can undo the best laid plans of mice and men.  Second, a good conference provides informal opportunities to meet and greet, which are often as important as the formal opportunities – in state capitols (and the US Capitol) it’s called working the halls.  Serendipity reins.

­Not surprisingly, a theme, sometimes unspoken but often addressed directly, ran through each of the Washington conferences this week: competitiveness.  Not because it is the only education initiative proposed by the Administration, but because of its pervasiveness around the world.  Not since A Nation at Risk nearly two decades ago have the stakes seemed so high.

Why? Writing in the early 80’s Peter Drucker confidently predicted that all the advanced nations would have similar domestic agendas, reflecting a preoccupation with education policy.  Why?  Because the principal source of wealth in the modern world is human capital: knowledge, skills, talents and dispositions.  And like the conferences that show case human capital, some human capital is “made”, the product of deliberate policy processes and some is simply due to serendipity, luck of the draw.

It falls to policy makers to sort out that part of human capital formation that can be shaped by policy and the part that cannot.  Indeed, the discussion is an important one made all the more important by events.  For provocative reprises on this daunting subject, New York Times  columnist David Brooks suggest two collections of essays, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence E Harrison and Samuel P Huntington, Basic Books, NY, 2000 and Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2004.

Denis P. Doyle
March 7, 2006

What are we to make of the idea that culture is a key variable in schooling? The extremes are obvious – a cultural bias on behalf of academic excellence will lead to higher levels of academic achievement than the opposite. Indeed, much higher levels of achievement. Why?

Peter Drucker once described American schooling as an “extraction” system, one from which certain loosely defined cultural groups (East Asians, Northern Europeans, Jews) are able to extract a reasonably good education. His description certainly rings true in well-to-do enclaves which share academic values.

Thus, it comes as no surprise to learn than National Merit Scholarship winners are concentrated in certain areas: in private schools in Washington DC (as distinct from DC’s public schools); in towns where intellectual pursuits are primary – think of the areas that serve the Sandia, New Mexico labs, Palo Alto CA, New Trier IL; or individual schools of distinction, such as Boston Latin, Lowell in SF, or Peter Stuyvesant in NYC.

In each of these examples, students are saturated with what sociologist James Coleman called social capital (as students in elite colleges and professional schools are). If the old saw that bright kids can get a good education no matter where they go to school has any basis in fact it is due to the social capital charge they carry.

But I doubt that the old saw has much if any truth to it – rather, it is either evasive (a sort of up-scale blaming the victim) or perverse. Smart kids need a demanding curriculum as much as slow kids do. Indeed, if slower kids are asked what they would like from school, they tend to say they want what the bright kids get. Perhaps because I served on the National Commission on Time and Learning, I tend to see schooling through the lens of time on task. Anyone can learn (within limits) if adequate time is available. Indeed, the difference between bright and slow kids is precisely that: time.

A bright youngster gets it in a hurry, a slow youngster (as the adjective suggests) simply takes longer.

Which takes us back to “social capital:” of what does it consist? Two things, content knowledge and attitudes toward life and learning. For example, the son or daughter of well educated, bilingual parents (who speak both languages at home) has a tremendous head start in mastering two, even three languages.

The other aspect of equal importance is attitude or disposition toward learning. Lucky indeed is the student endowed with a good attitude.

Notice what I have omitted in this formulation: talent, intelligence, creativity. Each one of which is important in its own right, but not nearly so important as knowledge and attitude. Indeed, talent, intelligence, creativity are catch-alls that mask as much as they reveal. With the notable exception of people like Michael Jordan, Mozart and Einstein, intelligence and talent are much overrated. And even in their cases, application, diligence, hard work, hustle count for a lot.

What policy tools are available to increase social capital? They are few and poorly understood. There is no content or attitude elixir. But there are incentives and disincentives, rewards and sanctions. And they are as likely to work in the education realm as any other. Imagine increasing the number of merit scholarships for higher education (as it happens we no longer have to imagine such an event. It is happening across the country and around the world).

If that is too elitist an image imagine communities of scholarship at the elementary and secondary level – schools of choice, thematically organized, by academic or vocational content. Indeed, some already exist, such as the Bronx School of Science and Mathematics; with a dozen applicants (or thereabouts) for each seat it should come as no surprise to learn that a dozen years ago the Manhattan School of Science and Mathematics was created (out of the shell of the old Benjamin Franklin HS on FDR Drive.) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

What should come as a surprise is that no more schools were created; the flattery ended not with a bang but a whimper.

Perhaps it is now time to clone the Bronx School of Science and Mathematics not only around NYC, but the nation as a whole.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 6.09, no 148
March 1, 2006

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has re-opened the culture wars, though not as you might at first think.  He’s not just contrasting forbearance and permissiveness, anything goes libertarianism v. sober restraint, prudence as opposed to abandon, the cultural coarsening permeating all aspects of modern secular and materialist life (not just Hollywood).  Rather, he’s doing something even more daring: in a recent column he noted culture has a bearing on how well students do in school.  (See David Brooks, NY Times, Sunday February 19, 2006, Questions of Culture. www.nytimes.com).

As he observes, “At home, we spend more money on education than any other nation. We have undertaken a million experiments to restructure schools and bureaucracies. But students who lack cultural and social capital because they did not come from intact, organized families continue to fall further and further behind — unless they come into contact with some great mentor who can not only teach, but also change values and behavior.”

To be sure, the theme is an old even obvious one, but it has gotten precious little attention lately.  For a reason.  Linking culture to academic achievement went out of favor when it became identified with blaming the victim.  But as Brooks points out, it is obvious that certain “cultures” better prepare their members than others.  For example, East-Asian and Jews do better the world ‘round: as Brooks observes, “they seem to thrive commercially wherever they settle.” But is this a “fact” that is best recognized, disputed or ignored?

When Charles Murray argued that Blacks did not have IQ’s as high as Whites and Asians he was roundly criticized.  For a reason.  The observation, even if it were true, has no policy relevance.  Or as Leon Kass observed, as Aristotle knew there are two kinds of knowledge, useful knowledge and useless knowledge, good knowledge and bad knowledge (an insight Murray did not have).  Which camp does Brooks’ observation about culture fall into?  Is it useful knowledge?

It all depends.  If culture is a catch-all used to explain everything it explains nothing.  Some students do well and some do not.  Culture tells.  But if culture can be disaggregated into its discrete parts it can become both a powerful explanatory and policy tool.  For example, both East-Asian and Jewish cultures have certain aspects in common that account for high levels of academic achievement: both are cultures of the book.  Both revere learning and learned people.  The term rabbi means teacher, just as the honorific San (in Japanese) means teacher.

Remember Tevia from Fiddler on the Roof?  What would he do if he “were a wealthy man?”  A fancy horse and carriage, a fancy house, material goods? To the contrary, he would study!

Rather than “blaming the victim,” these insights provide policy and practice opportunities.  Celebrate learning at an early age.  Accelerate learning at all ages – give magazines and books as gifts, read to children, enrich early childhood education, extend the school day and year, take standards-based education seriously, praise and reward high levels of academic accomplishment.  (At least take it as seriously as athletics.)  This describes exactly what college-bound, upper-middle class families do at home and what “good” public and private schools do in class.

As Brooks observes “If the big contest of the 20th century was between planned and free market economies, the big questions of the next century will be to understand how cultures change and can be changed, how social and cultural capital can be nurtured and developed, how destructive cultural conflict can be turned to healthy cultural competition.”

To round out this discussion there is another way in which the term “culture” has gained currency in both the worlds of business and schooling, and that is to describe the distinctive attributes of what goes on in the firm or school, the network of connections and shared values that account for institutional character: culture writ small.

The question before us as educators is to understand the interaction effects of culture writ large and culture writ small – what can school culture do to reinforce cultures that honor study and learning and to overcome cultural barriers that disdain study and learning?

Denis P. Doyle

February 21, 2006

Once again, the Public Agenda Foundation has hit a home run reminding us that as poet Robert Burns tells us, there “’tis many a slip between cup and lip.”(Seewww.publicagenda.org) In the first of a new series called Reality Check 2006: A Report from Education Insights at Public Agenda, the following question is raised: Are parents and students ready for more math and science? The short answer is “no.”  So is the long answer.  This in contradistinction to a growing sense of urgency among policy wonks,  policy makers and business leaders about the importance of improving both teaching and learning science and mathematics.

As the report’s lead author, Jean Johnson, notes in her introduction, groups as diverse as The American Diploma Project, the Education Trust and The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation “believe that expectations about what youngsters learn in high school must be raised and raised dramatically.” Jean goes on to observe that the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce are “leading voices for dramatically increasing the focus on science and math in the nation’s high schools.”

(What she neglects to mention, no doubt because she went to press early, is the administration’s competitiveness initiative – with its heavy emphasis on math and science education -- which Mr. Bush rolled out last week.  Everyone is in on the act.)

The sixty-four thousand dollar question, of course, is: “Just how ready are American families to take up the challenges these leaders propose?”

The answer to this question is, to say the least, disconcerting: it is, in a phrase, “not very.”

To once again to quote Jean Johnson: “despite parents’ lip service (to the idea that) US schools should be competitive, proposals to increase math and science coursework for their own kids could come as something of a surprise.”

Compare US students to the competition and not only do our 12^th graders bring up the rear, most American students and parents think they are doing just fine; scientific evidence that “ignorance is bliss.”  By way of contrast Japanese families think their students are not working hard enough and too little is expected of them!

No wonder it is so hard in the US to harness student effort; most American students think they are working hard enough already!

As Edmund Burke knew so well, it is the duty of leaders to lead, and this is precisely the entreaty that Public Agenda lays before the reader.  But is it enough to exhort leaders to exhort the public?  This strikes me as a one-size fits all solution that expects too much of too many and too little of too few.  As a consequence it is not likely to work.  Foot dragging alone can kill the most well-intentioned reforms.

What I am convinced could work is an idea that former Xerox CEO David T. Kearns and I put forward nearly two decades ago in our book, Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive.  Establish at least one fast-track, demanding high school in every city and suburb in the nation. Create them as open enrollment institutions whose attraction would be precisely that they are unabashedly demanding.  And keep establishing new ones till student demand is satisfied.  Such a strategy can satisfy the most and least ambitious simultaneously.

The alternative – trying to crank up math and science to hitherto unheard of levels in the US for everyone – could have the unhappy outcome of outright failure. In this connection, one is reminded of the complete text of poet Thomas Gray’s On a Distant Prospect of Eton College:  “where ‘tis folly to be wise, ignorance is bliss.”

Education for Global Leadership: the Importance of International Studies and Foreign Language Education for US Economic and National Security, a statement by the Research and Policy Committee of the Committee for Economic Development, released February 9, 2006, is the latest in a distinguished series of CED policy statements on education. (See www.ced.org.)  (In the interests of full disclosure, I was the co-study director, with Marsha Levine, of the first CED education study.  Released in 1985, Investing in Our Children: Business and the Public Schools remains as timely today as when P&G CEO “Brad” Butler oversaw its production.)

Education for Global Leadership could not be timelier itself; there was still a speculative cast to the role of human capital when Investing in Our Children was produced nearly two decades ago.  The study’s principal economist, Dan Saks, estimated human capital returns to be on the order of eleven percent.   The evidence is now in, of course: human capital is the sine qua non of wealth creation in the modern world, both in the developing and developed parts of the globe.

And particularly as the world is flat, to borrow from Tom Friedman’s book title, human capital is more important than ever.  Why?  Because it is almost entirely fungible. Which is to say, it doesn’t much matter where the human capital resides, whether it is a writer idling away with a laptop in Tahiti or an airline call center in India (when I made my last set of reservations by phone the clerk was in Pune India!)

One thing remains non-fungible, however, and that is language. You speak it or you don’t, and the “right” language is the key to global success.  And the “right language” is not necessarily English.  As IL Senator Paul Simon dryly noted in his book The Tongue-tied American (written more than two decades ago) you can “buy in any language, but you sell in your customers.”  The real issue is the right languages.

True, English has become the modern lingua franca;  it is the first language of half a billion people, the second language of a billion more, and the third language of one more billion, but not only is it not spoken in many parts of the world, lack of second language proficiency is a security as well as an economic issue.

Learning a second language is not for the faint of heart;  even “easy” second languages such as Spanish and French (“easy” for English speakers) require diligence and application, not to mention the effort and commitment involved in learning “hard” and “super-hard” languages such as Arabic, Chinese, and Thai.  To be sure, these strategic languages merit special attention, and the recent announcement by the president of special attention to the issue is most welcome.

In the meantime, it is useful to dust-off two old ideas with a solid pedigree – first, reinforce the second languages that our students already bring to school with them and second, require second language mastery as a condition of graduation from high school (and admission to post-secondary study).

In this scenario there is no a priori preference for hard or strategic language study – I leave that to the Departments of State and Defense – rather, we have an opportunity to turn to what language mavens think of as “heritage” languages (the languages many of our parents and grandparents spoke but have gradually evaporated).  The example closest to home would be America’s de facto second language, Spanish.  Well over ten percent of Americans are part of a Spanish-speaking tradition (which in many settings is vanishing).

My own family is a case in point: my wife’s first language is Spanish (born in Mexico of a Mexican father and a Spanish-American Mother), our daughter’s Spanish is serviceable, our son’s non-existent, and mine severely limited: poco y malo!

There is an old joke among language teachers:  What do you call a person who speaks three languages?  Tri-lingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages?  Bi-lingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language?  American.

To require all American students to master a second language would have a second order effect that would be important in its own right: youngsters from limited English-speaking homes would have a subject in which they could shine (at least as compared to their English-only classmates) and then, like their Asian, African and European counterparts they would be ready to master a third language as well.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 6.06, no. 144, 2/8/2006

Tom Friedman’s best seller, The World is Flat, makes one overarching point – globalization makes every one a player.  No longer does the advantage automatically go to the industrialized nations.  Indeed, the “rich man’s club,” the OECD nations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) are just one more set of actors on the world economic stage.  And all indicators suggest that China and India are the next generation of economic powerhouses.  Why?

Because of their relentless and single-minded development of human capital.  What, prey tell, is human capital?  A modern coinage, human capital draws a bright-line between physical capital --  natural resources, plant and equipment, once the source of almost all wealth – and what people know and are able to do.  Knowledge, skills, talents, capacities and dispositions are human capital’s defining characteristics.

Of these characteristics, some are partially innate (talents and dispositions, for example), some are the product (at least in part) of culture (knowledge and capacities, for example).   But the aspect of human capital that is important to policy makers (and practitioners) is the part that is affected by formal schooling. Knowledge and skills are acquired, most often in school or on-the-job. (Policy cannot change culture, for example; or if it can, only very slowly and uncertainly).

Education is where the action is across the globe.  It takes slightly different forms country-to-country, but schooling is the constant.  I was reminded of this by parallels between my recent visit to China and SchoolNet CEO Jonathan Harber’s recent trip to India.

In both cases we asked to see local schools.  In both cases we were taken to private schools.  Not for ideological reasons; to my knowledge, the voucher debate has not reached India and China.  To the contrary, private education in both countries is tolerated by the authorities for purely pragmatic reasons: in both cases government cannot keep up with overheated demand.  The private sector can.

Indeed, it is tempting to speculate about why China – still officially a communist state -- is willing to tolerate private schools.  A plausible explanation is this: private investment in education soaks up excess dollars in a socially acceptable way. (From the party’s standpoint, it beats other forms of conspicuous consumption all hollow: what plays in school, stays in school). Permitting schools to charge tuition encourages both a demand and a supply response.  In the modern era, spending on human capital is not just an expenditure of current income; it is actually an investment in future wealth formation.  Put bluntly, spending on education pays, spending on consumer goods costs.

The old Chinese proverb has never rung more true:  Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.

Whatever the instrumentality – public schools, charter schools, home schooling, private schools – enriched human capital is the outcome, so long as the schooling experience is productive.  And in the developing world it is productive in large part because of student effort, revealed in the fierce competition for limited seats – abundant student effort is the sine qua non of the third world.

Ironically perhaps, the third world is perfecting an elite model of education designed to draw out the best, brightest and most ambitious students and their families.  In the West, public discussion about equity is the heart and soul of education policy.  In the developing world it is about expanding access to quality schooling.  With more than half the population – 900 million people – rural poor, education is truly the only way out in China. 

January 31, 2006

My recent column on student effort elicited a strong but proper response – one correspondent agreed that student effort is an essential part of the achievement puzzle but asserted that I was blaming the teacher for lack of student effort.  T’was not my intention, though the point is valid: how important is the teacher as motivator (as distinct from pure information provider)?

First, teacher inspiration falls across a broad spectrum, not just the milk and honey end.  On the positive side of the ledger, I hazard the guess that we all remember teacher(s) who made a profound difference in out lives – for the better.  Not only did they impart information – knowledge – that was critically important to our education, they inspired us to learn (and to become better for it).

Indeed, literature and movies are full of poignant examples of the power of education to transform the lives of both teachers and students, ranging from How Green is My Valley to Look Homeward Angel to The Poorhouse Fair to The Water is Wide to Blackboard Jungle to Stand and Deliver.  In each case life-changing experiences unfold thanks to encounters with inspiring teachers and students.

(Indeed, The Water is Wide, Pat Conroy’s account of his year at a one-room school house on a remote island in South Carolina’s Low Country, is set in the school district that was SchoolNet’s first partner district, Beaufort SC.)

The “good” teacher is an easy example, but there is also the example of the abrasive, harshly demanding teacher.   At the post secondary level there is the enduring example of the curmudgeon par excellence Harvard Law professor Kingsfield as played by John Houseman in the 1973 movie, The Paper Chase.  He literally badgers his students into performing.

The most extreme example I can think of, however, was a story Al Shanker told me (and others, I’m sure) years ago.   It was an intensely personal account about student effort that was both chilling and inspirational.  As a child, Al came home after a day in grade school and complained to his mother that his teacher was anti-Semitic; his mother asked if she was otherwise a good teacher to which little Al replied, “Yes.”  His mother’s rejoinder was, in so many words, grin and bear it; tough even painful (but realistic) advice for a little boy in a tough urban environment in which there was no other recourse. 

These, of course, are no more than anecdotes, and while they reflect actual practice do not reflect policy real or imagined.  No one would recommend that anti-Semitism or racism be tolerated as a matter of policy, no matter how “good” the teacher was otherwise.  My point is a different one – adversity can build character, as it does on the playing field, or the rough and tumble of competitive academics.  Challenges are necessary if rewards are to have meaning.

But if individual teachers have been important to all of us, is it possible to imagine a system in which all teachers are able to motivate all students?  Barely.  With eighty-four thousand building principals it is hard enough to imagine all of them being skilled motivators, let alone three million classroom teachers.  Indeed, one is tempted to revive a discredited idea of the early 20^th century, “teacher proofing” the class room.  Peter Drucker was close to the truth when he described mass education as a system in which ordinary people are expected to do extraordinary things.

To be sure, thoughtful classroom management, carefully selected resources, imaginative teaching all have a role to play in short-term motivation.  For example, spelling bees and contests generally are powerful motivators for some students.  But here too, culture tells, as the list of spelling bee winners reveals, they are disproportionately foreign born.

But to reduce motivation exclusively to culture explains too little by explaining too much.  Culture is not a policy variable (except to ardent followers of Jean Jacques Rousseau).  What is available is information, letting youngsters know the wages of success (as well as the wages of sloth).  The hard truth is that economic success and personal fulfillment are intimately tied to education and that verity must be convincingly communicated to all students.

Denis Doyle
Issue 6.04, No. 142
1/25/2006

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof may not realize it, but he’s giving away state secrets when he tells us in Tuesday’s column that “one of India’s (and China’s) greatest strength is its hunger for education.”  (They’re Rounding the First Turn! And the Favorite Is... New York Times, January 17, 2006, p A19).  Indeed, the subject of student effort is so secret in this country that it’s rarely talked about in public.  To the contrary, drop-out and completion rates are the subject of choice in the US.  Beware blaming the victim.

Yet it is abundantly clear that student effort is a key variable in student performance (what Kristof doesn’t have space to acknowledge is that a “hunger for education” is endemic throughout Asia and the Third World in general) where competition for scarce school seats is ferocious.

This is nowhere more evident than in the Shanghai Mathematics School I visited last month where student discipline issues are unheard of, notwithstanding the fact that the average class size is 55 students per teacher.  With a dozen or more applicants for each seat, it is no wonder that discipline is not a problem (once the kids get in, at least).

More to the point, the students and their families are convinced that education is the first rung on the ladder out of poverty.  Kristof quotes the principal of a fee-charging Primary School for poor children in Calcutta: “what they (parents) didn’t get, their children must get.”

Kristof could not be making a more important point – our long-term economic well-being (and India and China’s economic ascendancy) hinges on education.  Not the education of the few – at which India, China and the US are very good – but the education of the many to very high levels of accomplishment.

Not long ago we could rest on our oars, content that we could (and would) siphon off the best and the brightest from around the world.  Indeed, Chinese government officials were so worried about the brain drain that they instituted draconian policies to insure that graduate students would return after studying abroad (spouses and children were not permitted to accompany students abroad, for example.  Hostages!  No longer. 

Particularly as Indian democracy builds (and as Korean and Taiwanese democracy does as well) and the Chinese economy races to new highs, it is no longer necessary to force graduate students to return.  Today they do so voluntarily.  Indeed, they now enjoy the best of both worlds, combining traditional values and culture with an admixture of Western business practices, elite education, engineering, science and mathematics.  Together with the fact that English is a national language of India (and more Chinese are studying English than there are Americans) it is no wonder that out-sourcing is increasingly popular.

Education, of course, is more than student effort – all the effort in the world will not produce Rhodes Scholars absent good teaching, access to a demanding curriculum, high standards and first rate resources.  Indeed, high quality education is still a gleam in the eye in much of rural China and India.  But just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait.

Is there an appropriate metaphor here at home?  Sports, particularly basketball, which is the low-cost, urban sport par excellence.  Among other things mastery requires practice, endless practice.  To be sure, talent helps, but time on the court is what separates the indifferent from the good from the great.  Remember Michael Jordan?  Even when the Bulls were one victory away from a tournament sweep on the off-day Jordan was on the court: practicing.  Effort and hustle is every bit as important as talent.

Add player-effort to a complete basket ball program – good equipment, fine facilities, world class coaching – and you get unparalleled levels of accomplishment.  The same is true academically.

Conceptually, the key to student effort is obvious:  motivation.  Motivation, in turn, is fueled by incentives (which hold out the prospect of rewards) and damped by disincentives (which promise penalties).  What remains is to marshal academic incentives that work for American students, just as sports incentives work for athletes.  Unless we master this piece of the education puzzle, no amount of funding or program changes will permit us to keep the pace being set by India and China.

Denis P. Doyle
January 17, 2006

The sorry state of many of America’s central city schools is brought home with a vengeance in New Orleans.  Arguably the most troubled big city district in the nation before Katrina, it barely exists today.  News accounts indicate that to date only one public school has reopened.  And today -- four months after the greatest urban disaster in American history – is the day the school recovery plan is to be announced.

The New York Times (nytimes.com/2006/01/11/national) reports that the rebuilding commission will recommend that the district be subdivided into semi-autonomous units comprised of a cluster of schools: a high school, a few middle schools, a clutch of elementary schools.  Each cluster would be free to set its own standards, curriculum, days and hours of operation and the like.  Each cluster would enjoy some modicum of independence, a step in the right direction.  I wish them well.

But rather than trying a cautious retread of business as usual, New Orleans might profit by looking at what the competition around the world does.  How do jurisdictions as diverse as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, London, Moscow, Frankfurt and Berlin organize and operate their schools.  Indeed, are there lessons from New York, San Francisco, Boston and the Chicago suburbs?  What, if anything, does this varied list of systems have in common?

Two things: they all host flagship schools that set the pace for the district as a whole and they set a very fast pace indeed.  I visited the Shanghai Mathematics high school and the Shanghai Foreign Language School last month, and over the years have either visited or studied flagship schools in the other cities such as the JFK high school in Berlin, New Trier outside Chicago, Gonzaga in Washington DC, Lowell in San Francisco and Peter Stuyvesant in lower Manhattan.  True, some of these schools are private; more to the point, all of them operate as though they were private schools. 

They are all tubs on their own bottom, setting and meeting standards of their own adoption. Hiring and firing on their own terms.  Selecting texts and resources according to their own intellectual lights. They survive in a market characterized in the first and last instance by parental choice.  They satisfy their clients or they are in trouble, big time.  Not all are examination schools – in New Trier for example, residence in the district is the price of admission – but all are chosen by the families that enroll in them.

And each of them sets and meets world class standards.  In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the First in the World Consortium boasts that its members do as well as students in Singapore, Tokyo and Shanghai.

In addition to being schools of excellence in their own right, flagship schools play a central role in urban vitalization (not re-vitalization.  That’s only needed if vitalization was missing to begin with.)   They act as neighborhood and community anchors (or magnets, if you prefer) providing the social cohesion necessary to community vitality.

Most important in an urban setting, flagship schools can hold the working and middle class families that are the literal difference between urban life and death.  A city made up largely of the very poor and very rich, virtually childless except for private schools, creates an urban environment that is sterile at best, dangerous at worst.

In this season of Supreme Court nominee hearings it may be useful to recall the experience of Justice Stephen Breyer quoted in a recent New Yorker Profile this fall: discussing how to approach questions of Constitutional interpretation Breyer says ". . . you can't escape your background, your own experiences. And I start with Lowell High School, Class of 1955. That doesn't mean a lot to you, but it means a lot to me.” (http://www.lowellalumni.org/alumni_headlines.shtml)

What was the most important formative experience of his life?  Attending San Francisco’s Lowell High School, a flagship school par excellence.

In a famous Sherlock Holmes story – The Adventure of Silver Blaze (written by Arthur Conan Doyle, no relation that I know of) -- the case is broken by something that doesn’t happen: the dog that didn’t bark.

As Inspector Gregory says:

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes responds: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

The curious education incident of 2005 is the resolute manner in which America continues to ignore the growing crisis in engineering, mathematics and science education. We are training too few just as our competition is beginning to crank out record numbers. True, there is obligatory breast-beating and hair-tearing, expressions of consternation that China, India and Japan are ratcheting up their production of engineers to unheard of levels, but little more. No policy initiatives that I know of are emerging that are gathering momentum.

The most obvious solution would be to borrow from what the rest of the developed and much of the developing world does; wholesale merit scholarships for the brightest students. But such a straightforward approach is presumably politically unpalatable here at home. Libertarians that we are, we prefer to let students borrow up to the hilt, major in what they like, and devil take the hindmost. The American way has been need-based student financial aid with little attention paid to national priorities, except on an occasional basis in times of crisis (such as the National Defense Education Act under Eisenhower, enacted in response to Sputnik. Which years later prompted Education Commissioner Ernie Boyer to wistfully wish that the Japanese would put a Toyota in orbit.)

One initiative not widely reported is the explosive growth in private education in the developing world, reported on extensively by James Tooley of the University of Newcastle (see http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/tooley.html#books) and described recently in a Washington Post column by Sebastian Mallaby (In India, Engineering Success¸ Monday, January 2, 2006).

Tooley’s field work has lead him all over the developing and developed world; I first met him at a conference on private education in China in 1999, when he was wrapping up a report for the IFC (International Finance Corporation), the private sector arm of the World Bank. I later interviewed him for a radio program I was hosting and found him fascinating, but a prophet without honor in his own land.

One aspect of private education that goes largely unremarked is that unlike exclusive reliance on government provision, private education permits people to invest in their own human capital formation. In the private education sector, supply can respond to demand just as it does in other sectors.

One of Mallaby’s most telling points is precisely that: in India, heated demand for education is stimulating a strong private sector response, something we in American take for granted. (Our mixed system of private and public schools is not the global norm, but a startling exception on the world stage.)

But we are left with a conundrum in the US – insufficient demand for science, mathematics and engineering study. Why do so few Americans opt for the demands and rewards of these subjects? The short answer has to do with student effort (or lack thereof). Asian students are famously focused and disciplined and are willing to bear down on hard subjects (an accusation never leveled at American students). The problem is becoming acute, for we are living in the era par excellence of hard science, math and engineering.

To understand why so few Americans are pursuing courses of study in these areas a long, hard look at the competition is called for. What is it about China, Japan, Korea and India that leads to heavy investment – both personal and social – in these fields? More on this later. In the meantime, permit me to close on a personal note about hard work as revealed in my 2005 highlight: my wife’s first book, A Journey Not Chosen. You can see for yourself why I like it– and why it represents pure hard work and discipline as well as grace and elegance -- by visiting her web site: www.journeynotchosen.com 

Happy New Year to each and every one!

Denis Doyle
Issue 6.1, no. 139
January 4, 2006

I’ve just returned from the First Annual Sino/United States Education Policy Roundtable (jointly organized by the National Center for Education Development Research (NCEDR) of the Chinese Ministry of Education and Penn’s Gradate School of Education (PennGSE) and sponsored by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, the Education Bureau of Xuhui District in Shanghai and Oracle) and I am still in a state of amazement.

Shanghai’s pace, energy and skyline reminds me of nothing so much as a modern gold rush town; with 19 million registered residents and another one to two million unregistered residents, Shanghai is one of the biggest cities in the world and it is growing in leaps and bounds. (The insider’s joke is that Shanghai’s bird is the crane: the construction crane that is. Knowledgeable people assert that 20 percent of the world’s high construction cranes are at work in Shanghai. It looks like it to me.)

My last visit to China was six years ago to present an invited paper at a conference on privatization held at Beijing Normal University – the Chinese premier had just announced that private education was consistent with the principles of market Socialism and the Chinese swung into action. Until then, private education if it existed at all did so in a grey zone. Six years later it is front and center.

The American participants in the Policy Roundtable had asked our hosts to arrange school visits and to our collective surprise we were taken to two private schools, one middle school and one high school. Both had started as public schools but had converted to private school status. The Shanghai World Foreign Language Middle School is a wonder to behold (see http://www.wflms.com/newschool/index_e.asp). Our 14-year old guide was totally self-possessed and spoke perfect English (our students should do so well.) WFLMS would be the envy on any American school, private or public, and at one-thousand dollars a year tuition it was a genuine bargain. (Prompting Chinese-American participant and charter school Principal Yvonne Chan to meditate about out-sourcing education…).

The Mathematics Specialty High School we visited was larger and more expensive – about two-thousand dollars a year – and had an average class size of 55 with an active alumni program: students would return from their prestige universities to chat with the younger students and occasionally lecture to whole classes. With a half-dozen applicants for every seat, discipline was not a problem.

One thing both schools (all schools south of the Yangtze River) have in common was no central heating. (With the temperature hovering at 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, we welcomed the obligatory tea breaks with the principals and senior staffs). The other thing they have in common is highly motivated students and teachers, all of whom are proud of the effort they put out to succeed. Like the Japanese, the Chinese realize that there is such a thing as talent but dismiss it as unimportant: what is important is hard work.

Student effort helps explain why Chinese students are so successful, but that is only part of the story. Teachers confer with each other about students they have in common to explore improving lesson planning and instructional delivery. Tutors (at least in more affluent settings) are common. Parental support is legendary – parents expect students to work hard and accommodate them with study areas and time at home. Perhaps most important, there is one high stakes national examination for all Chinese higher education so there is an implicit national curriculum with national standards. And while the thought of one high stakes exam sends chills down the spines of most Americans, it is radically meritocratic.

For anyone interested in learning more about Chinese life and education may I recommend Peter Hessler’s splendid account, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (Harper Perennial: NY 2001) A Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, he chronicles life as teacher’s college English teacher with humor and lucidity.

For my part, I read Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth in one sitting (13 hours over the North Pole from Toronto to Beijing); and even though it was written in the 1930’s, it serves as a perfect introduction to China.

In my last column (on the way to China) I borrowed from Tom Friedman and said the world is flattening; how little I knew. To use Friedman’s term of art, Shanghai is flat as a pancake. Not only could we get web-base e-mail and use our cell phones, the whole city was lavishly decorated for Christmas. Not since I was a child in Chicago visiting Santa Clause at Marshall Field’s have I seen such extravagant decorations and heard so many Merry Christmases: it was on everyone’s lips. So in the best Chinese tradition (and at the risk of sounding politically incorrect) may I too wish all our readers Merry Christmas

You may listen to this podcast by selecting play in the navigation below. NOTE: If you are using the Firefox browser, good for you, but the interview requires that you select this link.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.51
December 20, 2005

I was reminded of Peter Drucker as I prepare for the First United States – China Education Policy Roundtable in Shanghai next week. He was that genuinely rare phenomenon, a wise man. Among other things, he knew that events and developments interacted, often in unpredictable ways, but often in predictable ways as well. For example he knew that the post-industrial society – the knowledge-based society as he called it – was more than a transformation in manufacturing. Writing in the 1980’s, he confidently predicted that the task of developing human capital – formal schooling in particular – would preoccupy the world’s policy makers – country by country. How right he was.

I now travel to the China Education Policy Roundtable, which is jointly sponsored by the National Center for Education Development Research of China (NCEDR) and the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania (PennGSE). At first blush the disparities between our two countries jump out in high relief: China enrolls 312 million students in grades 1-6, 65 million in middle school and more than 30 million in high school compared to 55 million in the whole US K-12 system, public and private. Indeed, China is just now getting into high gear; for example, compulsory attendance in rural areas of China is relatively new and extends only to 6th grade.

But as vast as the difference in time, culture and scale may be, the similarities are greater yet:

First is the recognition that a nation’s wealth is its people’s skills, knowledge and proclivities; people are the natural resource par excellence.

Second is the realization that public policy is the preferred tool to develop human capital, largely through formal, public schooling. The market is increasingly important but the public sector is far and away the dominant player.

Third is the sobering realization that, at best, social policy is a very blunt and imprecise instrument (bringing to mind the old saw that you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink). It is often the bull in the China shop, doing as much harm as good – one need only think back to the era of Plessey as an example of harmful public policy. And try as it might, buoyed by all the good intentions in the world, Title I and more recently NCLB have had only weak effects. To be sure, public policy requires constant recalibration.

So to China I go to discuss and calibrate familiar themes: access, equity, funding, standards, curriculum, centralization and academic excellence. In short, we will be talking the talk of political science: who wins, who loses, who benefits, who pays, and who decides. That was the debate in the America from the time of the Northwest Ordinance (before there was a United States) through the debate in Lincoln’s time about Land grants for colleges, to the GI Bill (grants for human capital formation to use today’s nomenclature) to LBJ’s ESEA to George W. Bush’s NCLB.

The Roman satiric Juvenal captured the heart of the political debate with this: “Who shall guard the guardians?” While not an explicit question on the US/China Roundtable agenda, it will never be far from the surface – just as it is in the American debates about education policy.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.48, no. 137
December 7, 2005

As the Thanksgiving season races by, atavistic memories of the Pilgrims and one topical article of the long weekend remind me of three historical aspects of American public education, that while they have receded into the dim mists of time, are noteworthy nonetheless. (See Noel Epstein’s November 27, 2205 Washington Post Outlook piece Reading, Writing and Raising Kids , www.washingtonpost.com.) </SPAN< p>

Noel describes the schools as “hybrid institutions raising our kids,” first multi-service centers, second academic institutions. In loco parentis lives. But it was always thus. In an American context schools have always been called upon to be more than academic institutions (which accounts for why so many are less than academic institutions. I am reminded of Peter Drucker’s admonition to optimize not maximize.) </SPAN< p>

In this connection, it is worth remembering that the first “public schools” in the New World were the work of the Pilgrims’ descendents who enacted the Old Deluder Satan Act in 1647: it required every township in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with more than four children of school age to offer instruction – at public expense – in reading so that each citizen could turn to holy writ and be free of Satan’s entreaties. Talk about high stakes! </SPAN< p>

Fast forward to the early 19th century and read the education plank of the Workingman’s party platform (political parties in New York and Pennsylvania): beating Marx to the punch by many decades, it called for universal boarding schools for all children as the only way to eliminate class distinctions. </SPAN< p>

Then there was the other Senator Clinton, De Witt (who won a US Senate seat in 1802, resigning it in 1803 because he found Washington a disagreeable place to live). An inveterate reformer who was responsible for the Erie Canal, he also founded the Free School Society in the early 19th century. A vast charitable enterprise, it raised money to educate paupers who had no access to schooling (which, at the time, was almost exclusively sponsored by religious organizations). The task proved beyond the reach of private philanthropy and it soon fell to the public sector, with its access to tax revenues, to fund it. And the name soon changed to the Public School Society (with attendant rules and regulations imposed by statute). The reason for the creation of the Free School Society in the first place and its maintenance with public funds was quintessentially modern (and instrumental): to encourage economic vitality. </SPAN< p>

It is no surprise that Horace Mann (who we would today call a Chief State School Officer, serving as First Secretary to the Massachusetts State Board of Education from 1837 to 1848) is generally described as the father of modern public education; he stood squarely in this tradition, believing that schools should do more than teach reading, writing and sums: they should acculturate the common man (or what Mencken would later call Boobus Americanus .) </SPAN< p>

What binds these examples together is more than accidents of geography and temporal sequence: in each example, schooling is more than academics (by way of contrast, the point of a liberal education was education for its own sake, at least according to Cardinal Newman, an eloquent spokesman on behalf of the idea.) </SPAN< p>

As schooling is instrumental, concentrations of young people at specific times and places proved to be irresistible to policy makers: that’s why most schools provide food services, health services and day care services to name only the big three. (In Epstein’s piece he cites one school with more than 130 discrete, non-academic programs!) </SPAN< p>

The reasoning behind this phenomenon is both circular and perfectly understandable; sick children, or exhausted children, or hungry children (or all of the above) can’t learn. Ergo: treat, rest and feed them. Only then they can be educated. </SPAN< p>

But what’s true for students is true for adults as well – feeding, caring for and ministering to the needs (physical and emotional) of their charges spreads them too thin. No surprise that many students get the academic equivalent of a free lunch or a well-baby clinic (remember when OMB claimed that catsup was a vegetable? Or when DoE decided to put more starch in testing)? </SPAN< p>

What is presumably needed is a national children’s policy in which health care, day care and nutritional support are fully integrated and fully funded. Then schools could go about their business. But this only makes the decision in the Carter years to take the “E” out of HEW all the more unsettling (and not just in retrospect). </SPAN< p>

Opponents of the move, ranging from Harvard President Derek Bok to AFT president Al Shanker openly argued that education needed the strong support of a powerful Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. They asserted that creating a cabinet level Department of Education it would make education more vulnerable not more robust. History is their judge. </SPAN< p>

Denis Doyle
Issue 5.47
November 29, 2005

No modern thinker cut a wider swathe than Peter Drucker, and the scope of his thinking was echoed by the circumstances of his birth and background. Like Sigmund Freud and Joseph Schumpeter before him, he was a product of a vanished empire. Born in Vienna nearly a century ago in the twilight of the Austro Hungarian Empire (he died this week, just shy of his 96^th birthday) he was quintessentially modern in his thought. The father of management science as he called it, his mind was as restless as his pronouncements were provocative (and usually right). He was always a pleasure to read.

It was he who proclaimed that there was no such thing as a bad worker, only a worker out of place. Like Al Shanker (who may have owed the insight to Drucker) he noted that workers did not hire themselves, managers did. And it was up to management – if it hoped to justify higher compensation – to manage wisely and well.

It was his great insight that workers were an asset not a cost, a resource not an expenditure of resources. He noted that the job of mass education was to get ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And he was among the first to note the practical implications of human capital theory and high technology. Among the triumphs of the industrial revolution, he observed, was moving workers to their work; a triumph of the post-industrial revolution was moving work to workers.

He also dryly discoursed on a modern Marxist phenomenon – Marx had predicted that workers would one day own the means of production -- and with the onset on the modern pension fund (the source of much VC funding for today’s startups) workers now own the means of production: pension fund socialism Drucker called it!

A student of both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds, he preached the gospel of optimization, not maximization. Do what you are good at, both as individuals and firms. Trying to do too much is a recipe for failure. But his most important contribution is the idea of the modern entrepreneur, the person who invents something no one else knows they need or want – the Xerox machine, the Fax machine, the cell phone, the PC, the laptop, the GPS system. Indeed, each of these inventions required capitalism to incubate and deliver the profits to provide seed capital, the financial incentives to invent, and the financial rewards to implement.

And each example of successful entrepreneurial development carried with it a corresponding example of what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction, an idea first brought to my attention by Peter Drucker. By creative destruction they meant the replacement of old and inefficient processes or products with new, novel and efficient processes or products. Without creative destruction, the telegraph would never have replaced the Pony Express nor the telephone the telegraph.

The social as well as the economic entrepreneur needs an environment that encourages and rewards entrepreneurship, a more obvious point in a market economy than in the worlds of government and non-profits, which are more heavily invested in the status quo ante bellum.

The entrepreneur needs the resources to experiment and tinker and an environment that will not only accept innovations, but reward him or her with compensation for a job well done. Markets are the ideal seed-bed for entrepreneurship because the path from the gleam-in-the-eye idea to deployment is clear and the incentives are real. That is because efficiency is rewarded in markets, and substitution of the new for the old occurs continuously.

This is true in markets because no single producer or consumer controls price (cost does not determine price – a willing buyer and seller does).

Indeed, when cost determines price there is no market, witness monopolies like the old Soviet Union, oligopolies like the old Ma Bell, partial oligopolies like Detroit’ s Big Three Auto producers in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s or government activity in general.

In those environments innovation is frowned upon, even actively resisted. The entrepreneur is viewed as an interloper at best, a trouble maker at worst. In this connection, it should come as no surprise to note that the single biggest problem the nation’s schools face -- public and private, for-profit and non-for-profit – is a lack of social entrepreneurship.

Denis P Doyle
Issue 5.46, no 135
November 16, 2005

Unhappily, Prisoner of Time, the report of the US Commission on Time and Learning, (released May 5, 1994) proves to be timeless. Unhappily because its carefully reasoned conclusions have never been implemented. (Mea culpa: I was a member of the commission and am a party at interest.) After more than a decade gathering dust, it has been re-issued by the Education Commission of the States (October 19, 2005) and it is as current as the day it was released. Which is to say, almost nothing has happened to change its findings and recommendations. (The reprint - including the handsome artwork -- was funded by Washington Federal and is available in hardcopy through ECS or you can download it at www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/64/54/6454.htm )

Its central point remains unchanged: throughout its modern incarnation - the last century and one half - schooling has held time constant and let learning vary. The challenge of the post-modern era is to make time the flexible variable and hold learning constant (using high and demanding standards.) (Thanks to former NIE director Pat Graham for this elegant insight.)

Put most forcefully, teaching and learning are still subject to the tyranny of the clock and the calendar. Once this made sense, particularly when the explicit metaphor for the school was the factory. Mass education called for mass production; teachers were workers (interchangeable parts), the school was the conveyer belt, and students were the product. But as Al Shanker wryly noted, when a quarter of the products don't reach the end of the belt and another quarter don't work when they get there, you don't improve performance by running the production line longer and faster. You get a new metaphor.

Well, a new metaphor is at hand: the post-industrial, knowledge-based, high tech economy. Add standards-based to the recipe and the old time-based system looks even more archaic. My favorite example is foreign language instruction: the best language schools (the Foreign Service Institute or the Naval Academy for example) don't measure language acquisition in time-bounded bits (true, they still have clocks, calendars and seat-time) but students are expected to learn as much as they can as fast as they can.

In the FSI learning targets are set depending on the student's eventual assignment - consular official, commercial attaché, spy, for example -- and you study till you get it.

That a Foreign Service officer with an Hispanic background will master Spanish faster than a student who's never been exposed to Spanish before is part of the calculus. So too will students with linguistic facility - what ever that may be -- master a second language faster than someone with a tin ear. And what's good for language instruction is good for the curriculum as a whole.

It is so obvious that the systematic refusal of schools to abandon the old metrics and adopt new practices wholesale cries out for explanation. The possible culprits are many:

• The most obvious is institutional lethargy, the nearly irresistible impulse to do things as they've always been done;
• Another culprit is fear of the unknown;
• A third is an understandable desire to conform, adult peer pressure, if you will;
• A fourth is habits of mind, particularly those inculcated by a long tradition of centralized control and command;
• A fifth is the absence of market forces which impartially reward the efficient and punish the inefficient; and,
• Sixth, and perhaps most important, is the overwhelming weight of tradition and culture: tradition is after all, as Chesterton defined it, the democracy of the dead.

It is noteworthy that even in our mixed education market - public, private, parochial, for-profit, not-for-profit, higher, lower, foreign and domestic, low and high tech - does not escape these strictures. To my knowledge, while a few individual schools are no longer time-bound there is as yet no group of schools that has abandoned the metrics of clock and calendar. They are all, across the board, still prisoners of time.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.45
November 8, 2005

Imagine a college preparatory school that opened in August 2005 perched above San Francisco Bay, hard by the old Presidio parade ground (until recently the San Francisco Presidio was an active military installation in what was arguably the most beautiful military or civilian site in the United States). The distant views alone are spectacular, with Ft. Point below and the towering Golden Gate Bridge above; the near views of the Presidio are its equal, with towering eucalyptus trees framing the dome of the Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Marina Green. It simply takes your breath away.

Imagine as well a building converted from military to civilian use that preserves the historic exterior and interior lines but now accommodates high school students rather than cryptographers. Large windows open on the scenic vistas, four floors of classrooms, laboratories and offices -- all wheelchair accessible - capped by a roof aerie that is a true eagles nest (for a faculty lounge) that once housed the Pacific fleet's communication center (through which the first news of Pearl Harbor came tapping in by Morse Code more than half a century ago.)

Imagine a school that draws on the whole of the Bay area for its ethnically and socioeconomically diverse student body, from the South Bay to the Peninsula, from Marin County to San Francisco itself.

Imagine all these aspects and you'll be halfway there. Truth be told, the less important half. As impressive as the setting and building obviously are there is one thing more impressive: what goes on inside the school. In that there is a lesson for schools around the nation.

First is the plan. Designed by backward mapping from 2030-40 to the present, the founders of the Bay School asked themselves a grand question: what should our graduates know and be able to do to assume leadership positions - as adults -- with confidence, commitment and capacity - in the decades ahead? That's what the Bay School is all about: preparing the next generation of civic, professional and business leaders for the Bay Area and the nation as a whole. The Bay School's time horizon is not next year or the next graduating class, but two to three decades out. No small ambition that. No wonder the Bay School's tag line is A New World, A New School.

To undertake so bold a vision requires solid grounding in the past as well as a clear-eyed and unromantic view of the future. Second it its statement of mission, at once traditional and future-oriented:

• To offer an imaginative, engaging and demanding college preparatory curriculum taught by master teachers who model the school's values
• To emphasize the centrality of studying science and technology, ethics and world religions in the twenty-first century
• To combine academic excellence with a multi-faith spiritual and community focus
• To encourage compassion, confidence and intellectual curiosity
• To build a diverse community of trust, resourcefulness, affection and good humor

By now it will have occurred to the reader that the Bay School is not a public but a private school. True insofar as it goes. As a legal entity the Bay School is private. Yet its structure and activities could not be more carefully designed to serve public purposes.

Nonetheless, when presented with such a school - intellectually rich, academically rigorous, physically beautiful, and spiritually aware - a common response for many of us is to dismiss it as an outlier, beyond the pale of public education. An outlier it is, but it need not be. The challenge public schools face is to do precisely what the Bay School is attempting, to use the jargon of the trade, to model its purposes, organization and behavior. We should expect no less of ourselves.

For more information visit www.bayschoolsf.org.

Denis P. Doyle
November 3, 2005

Two of the most talked about ideas in education improvement are beginning to come of age and as a consequence should soon be ready to meet each other, ROI and VA (return on investment and value added). Conceptually, each is powerful it its own right; taken together they could revolutionize education policy and practice. As an idea, each one is intellectually straight-forward. That's the good news. Implementation is another matter.

ROI is an economist's metric, a method designed to measure results. What effect does a given investment have, what measurable impact does it make? The greater the return on investment the better. (An investment is distinguished from operating expenditures. Typically longer-term, an investment is ordinarily made as a capital expenditure whose purpose is to build capacity. Operating expenditures are typically for day-to-day activities, disposable goods and services.

Not surprisingly, in the modern world, where human capital - what people know and are able to do - is more important than physical capital (plant and equipment), lines begin to blur. So too do lines blur in the capital intensive world of IT - is a laptop with a useful life of two years a consumer durable or a disposable, which is to say, is it more like a desk or book?

Indeed, the lines blur in several dimensions; not long ago, a corporation's wealth was measured by the physical capital contained within the factory's walls. When the gate closed at day's end, the capitalist's wealth was secured within. In today's high tech firm, by way of contrast, when the front door swings to a close at day's end, the firm's capital has gone home to have a drink.

Ironically, this insight has been largely lost on schools, among the most human capital intensive undertakings of modern society. A school's wealth is the people who populate it - students, teachers, administrators, aids; the buildings or machines within the buildings are of secondary importance. And the machines that should affect ROI - computers - are rarely treated as productivity enhancing tools (at they are in the rest of the economy).

Enter VA. The term value added is by now an old mantra in the private sector; it expresses the difference or enhancement a process makes in production (of a good, service or idea). VA can be achieved by a wide variety of approaches, ranging from the management of instruction, professional development, improvements in employee morale, strategic and tactical changes in processes, the introduction of new technologies, hiring better educated workers and the like.

In a school setting VA is typically meant to express what difference a given teacher or type of teacher makes; in its larger sense, however, VA should include standards, curriculum, lesson plans, instructional resources and programs. Each of these strands reflects a way in which value is added (or is not added, as the case may be).

The opportunity - and challenge - schools face today is to combine the best insights of ROI and VA, to tease out the biggest productivity kick. Some humble examples make the point:

• Which teacher characteristics lead to improved student outcomes?
  • Patterns of academic performance?
  • Degrees held?
  • Years of service?
  • Linguistic facility?
• Which textbook series (if any) lead to improved student outcomes?
• Which instructional interventions lead to improved student outcomes?
• Is teacher PD (professional development) linked to improved student outcomes?

And so on.

Answers to these and similar questions could improve teaching and learning both, because insofar as they can be answered sensibly and accurately the answers will remove a zone of ambiguity that hobbles school improvement. As things stand now most teachers do not want to be evaluated - hired, fired, paid - on the basis of student test scores. Understandably, because the science of testing is still too imprecise and the stakes are too high.

Legislators love ROI and VA because they see them as accountability tools. But they are much more than that. To use a medical metaphor, they are tools that permit sophisticated diagnosis, prescription and treatment. And doctors are held accountable for patients after they've been seen and treated, not before.

If teachers understood that ROI and VA were means to diagnose and then improve performance - of teachers as well as students -- the cloud of suspicion that surrounds ROI and VA might evaporate.

Denis P. Doyle Issue 5.42, no 131
October 19, 2005

Imagine a book that celebrates democracy, markets, the internet and diversity - including the positive role of non-experts -- not just as abstract ideals but as empirically validated virtues -- and you are ready for an intellectual roller-coaster ride. (To see for yourself, get a copy of The Wisdom of Crowds by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki. Anchor Books: Random House, New York. 2005 or visit www.wisdomofcrowds.com).

It is counterintuitive, bracing and reassuring reading and offers, as it were, a refreshing elaboration and point-counter point to Malcolm Gladwell's splendid books The Tipping Point and Blink (reviewed and recommended here in view point 101), in which I wrote:

In a rare double header, Malcolm Gladwell appears simultaneously on the NY Times hard cover and soft cover best seller lists. On the hard cover list appears Blink, a fascinating account of split-second decision making and why it is so powerful - and so often right. It is a quick read and a welcome antidote to the pressure to measure everything as a precondition for decision making.

His other book on the best seller list is by now familiar to many, The Tipping Point, which is a cultural and economic account of what anthropologists call cultural diffusion. An idea, a product or a service makes an appearance in the marketplace and is beloved by early adopters; it then either sinks beneath the waves never to be seen again or breaks out in spectacular fashion. How to tell which is which - in advance - is a powerful question, one that has plagued thinkers from time immemorial.

By way of contrast, Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, provides a unique insight into democratic decision-making: he begins his book with the story of British scientist Francis Galton at a Plymouth country fair in 1906. Like many if not most of us, Galton believed in breeding, knowledge and expertise, that one decision-maker (albeit an informed one) would make a better judgment than a collective decision-maker.

While at the fair, Galton seized upon a “naturally occurring experiment,” an ox-judging contest, with nearly 800 fair-goers guessing the dressed weight of an ox. Galton assumed (as would most of us) that the more knowledgeable guessers - butchers, farm hands and the like -- would be more accurate than the run-of-the-mill guessers, the crowd. He expected that most of the 800 guesses would be all over the map. To his astonishment, the average of all the guesses was 1,197 pounds while the actual dressed weight of the beast was 1,198 pounds. Nearly perfect, or as we say in Washington, good enough for government work.

Beginning with this humble example, Surowiecki tells a story about the wisdom of crowds which is as enlightening as it is fascinating. His points are powerful and have a direct bearing on all that we do. As Surowiecki says in the beginning of his book, “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

Not only is this a ringing endorsement of democracy at work, it is an argument on behalf of diversity, something many of us felt in our bones but had little empirical evidence to support. Indeed, as Surowiecki points out breadth of viewpoint is as important as expert knowledge. A group of experts tends to reinforce itself, speaking a common language and talking from a common point of intellectual departure. (Reminding me of Edmund Burke's famous quip that the study of law sharpens the mind by narrowing it). Broaden the group to include some less well-informed members and new ideas will present themselves, forcing discussion along pathways that experts alone would not pursue.

Surowiecki, it must be emphasized, is neither opposed to expert knowledge nor smart people - this is not an anti-intellectual screed. To the contrary, it is profoundly intellectual. Its power is that it is profoundly counter-intuitive. Indeed, Surowiecki describes his own sense of unease with his own analysis in his Afterword to the Anchor edition of the book when he is describing his own “experiments” with the wisdom of crowds. When asked to speak to a group, he would be “asked to manage a contest that could demonstrate collective wisdom in action.”

Surowiecki dryly observes that “each time” he did so, he “had a flash of uncertainty that this time something would go wrong and the crowd's guess would be way off the mark.” It never was!

At less than 300 pages The Wisdom of Crowds would be a quick read even if it were not so well-written, but well-written it is. Surowiecki not only spins out a fascinating theory, he does so with élan and dispatch. A master story teller, Surowiecki's book repays your investment handsomely. It is a page-turner that you will read with as much pleasure as insight.

Readers everywhere will eagerly await his next book.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.41 no. 130
October 12, 2005

I have heard the Chinese proverb so often – that the Chinese character for crisis is composed of two characters – danger and opportunity – that I long ago accepted it as revealed word. It has a wonderful ring of authenticity. Indeed, even Mr. Nixon used it. Imagine my disappointment to discover that this old chestnut has no foundation. At least no foundation in Chinese. An article I discovered on the WEB by University of Pennsylvania Professor of Chinese language and literature Victor K. Mair (see www.pinyin.info/index.html) debunks it utterly. In asserting that it is altogether without foundation he muses over the fact that there are over a million citations of this apocryphal quote, or as Mair says, this “spurious proverb.” Far be it from me to challenge so eminent an authority. I shall hence force not cite it as a Chinese proverb.

But I am interested in why it is so powerful and resonant and I intend to keep using it and describing it as either an apocryphal Chinese proverb or in the interests of full disclosure, a non-Chinese proverb.

Why? Because it fills a journalistic, even philosophical need so perfectly. It enjoys a million cites because it works so well, expressing a complex idea with the utmost economy. Unlike an oxymoron (government intelligence, for example), which is self-evidently self-contradictory, the spurious Chinese proverb is synergy at work – it expresses more, much more, that the sum of its parts. It presents what we know to be almost contradictory, but not quite. It captures the tension inherent in the juxtaposition of seemly different words by putting them together. Indeed, it evokes Hegel’s formulation -- thesis, antitheses, and synthesis -- all in a memorable phrase. If it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented (is that another proverb?).

So even if it doesn’t exist in Chinese I hope that I will be forgiven for using it. Among other things, it artfully expresses the dilemma of political leadership, the high stakes involved in decision making. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Or take another well-known aphorism that makes the point from a slightly different perspective: Murphy’s Law. If something can go wrong it will. Or, keep your hand on your wallet. Its power lies in its wry veracity: ‘tis simultaneously funny and true. Which is the root of all good humor. (There’s a good deal about this on the WEB as well with one source tracing Murphy’s law back to Edwards Airforce in California. It certainly has a military ring to it).

Evidence of the power of proverbs and aphorisms is offered by the way distinguished leaders take them to heart and operationalize them. Lou Gerstner, both as head of RJR and IBM had a signature saying: the greatest risk is not taking one. John Murphy, when he was Superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg issued tee-shirts to every teacher in the district proudly emblazoned with the legend, join the conspiracy to improve our schools or we’ll hold the revolution without you.

Such phrases, at least the first few times you hear them, have the added virtue of being slightly counter-intuitive – they are arresting and get your attention. They make you think, if only a little bit. (Given the media bombardment we are all exposed to, thinking even a little bit can be a big improvement on the status quo).

That is why the apocryphal Chinese proverb is so vivid in a school setting. Indeed this may be the biggest difference between the private and public sectors. In the private sector the discipline of the market makes change inevitable. In its most extreme form it brings about what Viennese economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction, the process by which markets force change on unwilling actors.

In both sectors, the crisis is real, the opportunity is real, the danger is real. Yet even when the need to improve is manifest, the incentives and disincentives are apparent and the stakes are high only the most intrepid public sector reformers grasp the nettle. Philadelphia’s Paul Vallas is a case in point: his aphorism might be Commander Farragut’s: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Unhappily for the cause of education improvement, for most public sector CEO’s danger is the element that focuses their attention – more than opportunity. More’s the pity.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.49
October 5, 2005

With this issue of The Doyle Report we launch our maiden podcast, a term of art I first encountered in political science in the last century, as in maiden speech or maiden voyage. (See the radio button at www.thedoylereport.com or www.schoolnet.com.)

A maiden speech -- a member of parliament’s first speech – is typically non-controversial and politely received (no heckling allowed), though on occasion it is controversial as was MP Benjamin Disraeli’s famous maiden speech when he was elected in 1837.  (He proposed that there be no religious test to hold elective office in the UK).

A maiden voyage (as in that of a plane or ship) is no less fraught – the most famous (or infamous as the case may be) was RMS Titanic which sank on its first – maiden – voyage.

Needless to say, maiden events are a big deal.

So it is with some trepidation that The Doyle Report launches its podcast series.  Clearly the stakes are not as high and the likelihood of a fiasco is substantially less, even if the omens are not good.  Worse case is that it disappears without a trace. But unfavorable omens have a purpose that goes beyond signaling – to stimulate best efforts.  That, at least, is how we read the tea leaves today.

Put most simply, we hope that TDR podcast meets the same high standards as the TDR publisher, SchoolNet, Inc, whose corporate mantra is to make WEB-enabled products which are user-useful as well as user-friendly.

Podcasts in general meet the second test – they are user friendly, particularly given the phenomenal popularity of Apple’s iPod, one of the great consumer electronic success stories of all time.  According to one interview with Steve Jobs, there was much fortuity in the idea behind the iPod.  His eureka ­moment came when he noticed that kids were using computers to store music … and the rest is history.

Albeit a short history, since the iPod has only been around for a few years.  Released October 23, 2001, it exploded in popularity, enjoying 90% of market share by this time last year.  And portable music players have no where to go but up.  According to Bob Doyle (no relation) “the first podcast in recorded history” was posted on his server in July 2003, a little more that two short years ago (see The First Podcast atwww.digitalpodcast.com/podcastnews/2005)

The interesting questions, of course, have to do with content; as solid as the technology is, it is only as useful as the content it delivers.  With music, the verdict is in – portable music players are here to stay.  The extent to which they serve many masters – including podcasts – remains to be seen.  For my part, I’m betting on podcasts for the same reason that music was successful: it fills an unmet need.  (Even the spelling is a giveaway: typically, when a new compound word is coined in English, it is hyphenated till people get used to it, thus pod-cast until it evolves to podcast, which it already has done).

That the unmet need was not recognized before the advent of the iPod is simply a commentary on the nature of entrepreneurship – a coinage of 19^th century French economist Jean-Baptist Say the entrepreneur develops a product, service or idea that nobody knew they needed…and then they can’t do without it.

Listen in.  There’s more to come.

I received a phone call at home last night from an old friend, Adam Urbanski, with sad news: Sandy Feldman had lost her battle with cancer. Her death brings an end to a chapter in American labor history. A distinguished labor leader in her own right, she had labored in the vineyards with her mentor and predecessor, Al Shanker. Together they cast a long shadow; they embodied a period in which the teacher’s union movement came of age. Not only did they transform the American Federation of Teachers, by example and competitive verve they transformed the National Education Association as well. What had been a demure group of teachers – a majority of them Republicans – gathering in a professional association, the NEA also became a rough and tumble trade union. Imitation is certainly the sincerest form of flattery. Not since the days of Walter Reuther have labor leaders cut such a wide swath.

Sandy came from a long and honorable New York intellectual tradition, principled left-wing anti-Communism. A self-described Democratic socialist, Sandy stood squarely against totalitarianism of all kinds and stood squarely for the rights of the working man and woman. Sandy believed not only in equal opportunity for workers, she found public school bureaucrats no less oppressive than private sector managers, a transforming view of the public sector, particularly for those of us raised in thrall to FDR’s New Deal..

Among other things, Sandy was a graduate (with fellow alumnus Bill Safire) of The Bronx School of Science, reflecting at an early age her prodigious talent and energy.

I first met Sandy thirty years ago when the US-Australia Policy Project was convened – the American delegation included Jim Kelly (then of the Ford Foundation), Michael Kirst (who will soon become a professor emeritus at Stanford), Larry Cremin (TC President and education historian extraordinaire), Doc Howe (then Ford V P), and Donna Shalala (just having completed her tour as treasurer of Big Mac, the NY City re-financing authority). The American labor movement was as new to Australia as Sandy was. Needless to say, they hit it off, love at first sight. Which was characteristic of many of Sandy’s relationships; as Jim Kelly noted recently, “there was a joie de vivre about Sandy. Even while assailing presidents and deciding who would be mayor, she retained as part of her persona an irrepressible and ready smile.”

She was tough-minded without being nasty, forceful in pressing her point of view but respectful of differences, thoughtful to a fault. She was a wonderful friend and an honorable opponent. I was reminded of this in my last extended colloquy with her; she took exception to passages in an article I had written for Education Next which she thought was less than charitable about the teacher’s union movement. And she let me know the errors of my way in several pages of closely reasoned text. She had read my piece with more care than most editors and let me know precisely what she thought of it.

In response I said the following:

Thanks for your thoughtful note in response to my article… First, you know that I yield to no one in my admiration for Al and you and what you both represent. Indeed, I sometimes think I am the only conservative left standing who believes in the American Union movement; certainly the only education critic who never blames the unions, in speeches or in print. I take Al's wry comment to heart: teachers don't hire themselves, management does…. My commitment to unions is both professional and personal (I worked my way through college as a card-carrying hod-carrier) and I am convinced that unions are essential for a healthy economy and a healthy political and social order (not just in Poland, but here too).

In reaching this judgment I apply a simple test: what would I do if I were a teacher in a big district? I would join the AFT.

My quarrel is with emphasis and direction, and I write as a friendly critic; my concern about anti-intellectualism is principally directed at the NEA (and I suppose, the occasional AFT local). I am concerned about the long-term negative effects of the factory model and remain convinced that the guild is a more appropriate model; the professional model better yet. But, inter alia, this calls out for pay for performance - which, as I have written elsewhere, must be designed by teachers for teachers. Paying the best what we pay the worst is demoralizing and counterproductive. I have also argued that teachers should not be confused with social workers and have surly and recalcitrant students visited upon them. I've even argued that compulsory attendance after age 14 should be abandoned as a failed experiment.

Nevertheless, you are right; I should have given more credit where credit was due; you and Al took the high road on standards, curriculum and testing, and the AFT publishes a fine magazine which itself exemplifies your commitment to the life of the mind. And the guild notion I tried to develop at the end of the article owes a debt to Tom Mooney. Mea culpa.<</p>

Needless to say, I’m not in the habit of eating crow and Sandy’s capacity to induce me to do so is as high praise as I can confer.

Oh Sandy, we’re going to miss you.

With the worst of Katrina behind us, the hard part begins: rebuilding. My niece, a neurologist, was lucky – she evacuated (to Atlanta) before Katrina hit, and escaped with her car and a few personal effects. Like most evacuees she thought her escape would be temporary. But her apartment was destroyed and it’s not clear where she will go; as a physician, she’ll have more choices than most but her life has still been thrown into a cocked-hat.

Because of the personal connection no doubt, her plight is emblematic to me, bringing the disaster home in a way that would not otherwise be the case. The haunting Gulf Coast pictures have a special poignancy to me because of my niece’s circumstance; nonetheless, it is with some reserve that I give free advice to the sufferers. What do I know about the disaster? Precious little and mercifully nothing first hand. But I have been thinking about school improvement for more than thirty years -- my professional career -- and have been emboldened by the size and scope of the disaster to propose a serious exercise: rethink k-12 schooling from the ground up. Rarely does such an opportunity present itself except as an academic exercise.

I was reminded of this again this morning when a colleague wistfully said that a typical descriptor of the New Orleans Public school system before Katrina was that it was among the most troubled school districts in the nation; indeed, when Katrina hit, the New Orleans schools were in virtual receivership. Leading to a policy impossibility: the only solution was to start from scratch. Which could not conceivably happen. But mirable dictu, what had begun as hyperbole has been made necessary by events. It simply makes no sense to rebuild a school system from the same template as the old, discredited one.

What to do? The American Way would be to hold a design competition, not just for buildings and grounds, but for the underlying organization structure itself. Who would judge such a competition? The ultimate end-users, the students, parents and teachers who will work in the system and the taxpayers who’ll foot the bill.

How would such a competition be organized? Carefully, but its central tenants should be two. First, to work within a realistic budget; there is no challenge if there are no resource constraints. And second, to backward map from the school system’s ultimate objectives. What should they be and who should decide? The citizens of New Orleans should have an education “convention” to decide what it is their graduates should know and be able to do as a condition of earning a diploma.

Should every one study algebra and geometry or only the brightest? Should everyone master a second language (as European and Asian students are routinely expected to do)? Should everyone master English (as European and Asian students are routinely expected to do)? Should high-demand programs like the International Baccalaureate be available to all comers? Should vocational education be re-invented? Should there be enriched pre-K for everyone (as well as K?) Should high school be closed to students over 18? Should there be compulsory attendance? And so on.

Once those decisions are made, format will follow as form follows function. When the big questions are answered it will be possible to think through the format needed to deliver the goods. If everyone will be expected to learn algebra and geometry as a condition of earning a diploma, the whole math scope and sequence from pre-K on will have to be rethought and re-presented. Youngsters will have to be prepared, beginning not long after they leave the cradle. For starters, that means enriched pre-school for everyone, most particularly the dispossessed (assuming that the well-off already enjoy access to it.)

Not to be slighted will be decisions about physical plant. What kind of buildings are appropriate to education for the 21^st century? Certainly not the fortress-like structures of the last century. They must be high tech, high touch, high use facilities, built to accommodate tomorrow’s learners. Small, flexible, adjustable spaces will be called for, in multiple use settings such as shopping centers and high-rises buildings. The dewy eyed ideal of a dedicated, sylvan campus – open a scant 180 days a year – must yield to modern realities.

And perhaps most important, technology will have to be deployed in schools as it is in the larger economy – not as bells and whistles, fun and games (though it can serve those functions as well), but to increase productivity. Technology must not only be user-friendly, it must be user-useful. It must contribute to increasing academic performance in measurable ways. ROI is the term of art in the private sector – return on investment. It must enter the school improvement lexicon.

Tchaikovsky’s opera, Maid of Orleans, like many operas plays fast and lose with the truth. Unnecessarily in this case because the historical record is remarkably complete thanks to the note-taking of the scribes at Joan of Arc’s trial. But the true story didn’t satisfy Tchaikovsky’s romantic sensibilities: he turned it into a love story. And now the Washington Opera cast a 70 year old diva – with a splendid voice – in the part of 17 year-old Joan. So much for artistic uniformity.

We are witnessing the same kind of tensions in the modern New Orleans, arguably the most romantic city in the US – should the city be rebuilt as it was or should it be rebuilt in some dramatically new configuration? (That it should be rebuilt appears to be beyond dispute, the wholesale dispersal of its population to the contrary notwithstanding.) From an economic standpoint alone, the sheer size and complexity of New Orleans’ contribution to the nation’s economy calls for some kind of rebuilding; new and improved levies for a starter. From a romantic standpoint, New Orleans exerts a pull on the heart-strings of any one who has ever spent time there, which suggests restoration, not just rebuilding.

Now that the situation is being stabilized, citizens, city planners and public officials are beginning to weigh in with ideas and proposals, much as New Yorkers did (and are still doing) after 9-11. Indeed, such spirited debate and discussion is one of the most exciting parts of the democratic process, and one can only hope that the outcomes match the enormity of the task.

Call me a hopeless romantic if you like, but about one thing I am sure – the schools should not be rebuilt and re-organized as they were. This is the chance of a lifetime for the public at-large and the education community as a whole to fashion a new vision of mass education. The vision that was washed away by Katrina was well suited to its time and place – a factory model that prepared young Americans for an industrial economy: may it rest in peace. Its virtues were its vices. For example, high drop-out rates were tolerable because of the availability of low-skilled jobs, but that is no longer true.

Today’s schools should be preparing youngsters for the post-industrial, knowledge-based society. Nowhere is this truer than New Orleans.

Indeed, the most sobering aspect of Katrina’s wrath was the revelation that under New Orleans’ romantic exterior lurked untold poverty and unemployment. The nation’s 24^th largest city had the highest concentration of poverty of any large city in the country. And over the long-haul there is only one solution: education. But it must be education that is compelling, both for students and teachers. But my vision is not necessarily your vision

With last week’s column, for example, I struck a nerve – one outraged critic asserted that I was in the Business Round Table’s thrall. The evidence? My support of year ‘round schools. About year ‘round school support I stand guilty as charged, but I want to make it clear that I think the institution called school should be on call year ‘round, not that every student should attend 240 days a year. Some should, no doubt – summer learning loss is the term of art reformers use to describe what happens, particularly to poor and underprivileged youngsters. Others should not – a tennis or dance prodigy might enroll 180 days a year and tour or perform 60 days. A student whose family has a chance to go abroad for several months should have the flexibility to join them.

Closer to home, we can try a New Orleans specific thought experiment. Imagine hospitality arts high schools designed to prepare young people for the culinary arts and hotel industries, a main-stay of the New Orleans economy. They could be open 15 hours a day, 240 days a year, preparing kids on swing shifts to work in functioning hotels and restaurants as they honed their skills – and academic education – in a school setting. Plane and solid geometry offered for aspiring chefs and hotel managers as well as would-be architects, doctors and engineers. One aspect of year ‘round schools would be to rationalize the youth labor market; open year ‘round, they would not flood the labor maker in the summer months.

This is more than idle speculation – school attendance is counter-cyclical, to use the economists term of art. When work is abundant, enrollments shrink and vice versa. The first great enrollment surge in high schools corresponded to the Great Depression. No job? Go to school. No summer job? Go to school (and take a winter work-break or vacation).

Far from having the last word on such a serious subject I would like to think of these ruminations as the first word, to stimulate debate and discussion about the organization of schooling. Just as American ingenuity created the factory model school using and agrarian calendar, so too it can create a school which fits the realities of modern economic and social life.

Keep your calls and letters coming.

Denis P. Doyle
September 7, 2005

New Orleans is on the nation's mind and in the nation's prayers, both as literal victim of Hurricane Katrina and as the symbol of the larger destruction wrought on the Gulf Coast from Alabama to Mississippi to Louisiana. The mind simply reels at the news reports of such extensive devastation and catastrophe, the magnitude of the immediate suffering and the long-haul prospects for rebuilding.

It is hard to imagine. In particular it is hard to imagine the rite of “back to school” in those communities that have been virtually obliterated. Again, New Orleans is emblematic. The district opened August 18 but its 70,000 students are flooded out, probably for months. According to the NY Times, another 65,000 Louisiana students are flooded out as well.

As of this writing little education news is filtering out, but we assume the worst: the whole physical infrastructure in tatters with schools damaged beyond short-term repair, text- and work-books destroyed and teachers and students badly shaken and demoralized. Compounding the destruction of physical resources is the absence of electricity and potable water.

But as the old adage has it, it's an ill-wind the blows no good.

On the positive side of the ledger is a reservoir of good will and concern on the part of the American people. Gifts and donations are pouring into the Red Cross and Salvation Army at an unprecedented rate. And schools are pitching in as well: Houston ISD, for example, has already announced that it will enroll evacuees from Katrina (see www.edweek.com) and TX Governor Perry has put out the welcome mat for evacuees.

But on a larger time-scale, what conceivable education good could come of a disaster as mind-numbing as Hurricane Katrina? Only one and that is to convert disaster into opportunity by capitalizing on the obvious need to start from scratch. Since the education infrastructure must be rebuilt from the ground up, there is an opportunity to do it right. Rarely does a society have the policy latitude to think things through de novo and as dreadful as the circumstances are that make it possible, in this case they also make it necessary.

Katrina, then, forces us to raise some fundamental questions about the way we, as a society, provide preK-12 education. (In this connection it is important to remember that the nation's nearly 15,000 school districts - which all look almost exactly alike, are in fact independent. They could be very different - that they are not is a commentary on the holding power of shared values and customs.)

What might a brand new school and school district look like if we started all over again? Would the contours remain the same - one teacher and 25 kids (grouped by age) meeting in a 50 minute class 180 days a year, in an environment that can only be described as low-tech? Or would the school of tomorrow look more like the high-tech work-place its graduates hope to some day work in?

If school looked more like the high tech world, a few things would change immediately:

• Age grouping would be replaced by proficiency grouping;
• The agrarian calendar would be replaced by the 240 day work calendar;
• The six hour day would be replaced by truly flexible scheduling;
• The curriculum would be genuinely standards-based and standards-assessed;
• Graduation (and a diploma) would be earned by demonstrated mastery, not time in the saddle; and,
• Productivity-enhancing, high-technology would be deployed with a vengeance.

Imagine tracking students and delivering content with the same system. Imagine no more text-books - a wireless lap-top for every student. Imagine a wealth of content available by wireless broad-band. Imagine the end of paper and pencil testing, replaced by demonstrations, declamations, and computer adaptive testing for summative and formative purposes. Imagine no more immutably fixed school buildings - classes would meet in store fronts, churches, libraries, community facilities, benevolent associations, and private homes. Imagine the end of compulsory attendance with guaranteed access to a well-taught, high-demand curriculum in it's place.

Imagine as well a singular side-effect: the bitter terms of the current debate about vouchers and privatization evaporating. (Giving every child of school age a wireless laptop with equal access to WEB-enabled content would forever blur the line of demarcation between public and private schools.)

A tall order, to be sure, but not as far-fetched as it might seem. In Katrina's wake, thousands of youngsters will be without physical school buildings for months, even if rebuilding begins immediately a meaningful first step could be a technology fix. And as NPR reported:

The New Orleans Time Picayune had no print edition for three days, but the newspaper and most other media outlets have continued to operate on the web.

In addition to media websites postings on blogs and community sites abound. Craigslist, a city-by-city classified and chat site, saw a 300 percent increase in use of its New Orleans section on Wednesday, says CEO Jim Buckmaster.

This is not the first major disaster where the Internet has played a role. For example, after the recent bombings in London people posted photos and eyewitness accounts on line.

What works for the private sector can work for the schools. The state of Florida's FLVS (Florida Virtual School) for example, already enrolls 25,000 students; its trademarked motto? Any time, any place, any path, any pace™. (See www.flvs.net). It's not too much to imagine doubling that number with New Orleans students alone.

It will take thinking - and acting -- outside the box on a grand scale to solve the problems Katrina has spawned. And it would be a great public service if good was to come of what is so far an unmitigated disaster.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.34
9/1/2005

Deep in the dog days of August, I am reminded of the best education question I was ever asked. Many years ago, when he was about eight, my son Christopher asked “Dad, why can't school be more like camp?” Why indeed.

This seemed to me then as it does now to lie at the heart of what is wrong with schooling, particularly for younger children - too often school is seen as drudgery, camp as fun, school is work, camp is play. Indeed this dichotomy reminds me of a thoughtful observation of longshoreman-philosopher, Eric Hoffer, author of The True Believer, in print now for more than half a century. Musing about what distinguishes man from animals, he thought it was not just the opposable thumb, not just language, not just memory and the capacity to conceive the future (including a future without us), not just the capacity to empathize and put oneself in the skin on another. No, Hoffer's insight was that a distinguishing feature - the distinguishing feature - was a sense of playfulness that survives beyond youth.

From playfulness emerges creativity, the capacity to use our minds pro-actively and not just reactively.

By and large animals are playful only while they are juveniles - as they grow old they become as humorless as Simon Legree. And it is through play - with each other, with their mother (occasionally their father) and with their larger environment that they learn everything they need to know to become successful adults. In relatively short order. Think of lion cubs or kittens or puppies - in proportion as they become masters of their world they lose much if not all of their playfulness.

Indeed, so much do we prize certain aspects of animal playfulness - Rover fetching a stick, Fido a ball, that we actually breed these characteristics in. Imagine playing with a wolf cub, then imagine playing Frisbee with a mature wolf!

Not so humans - the best of us remain playful until our dotage. For example, my 95 year old mother, though largely deaf and often confused, still loves a joke, still thrives on word play and revels in the absurdity of the human condition.

As to the issue of camp vs. school I decided to revisit it by interviewing two experts, my grandson Tobias, who will be eight in two weeks and my granddaughter Chloë, who will be six in three weeks, just as school begins again. They have spent the summer blissfully happy in play, doing and learning serious things that will stand them in good stead for a life-time, among them swimming (as California kids Tobias is learning the butterfly this year, having mastered the crawl already and Chloë is working on her crawl) and tennis. Chloe is raising butterflies from caterpillars she finds in her back yard (morning cloaks). About tennis camp Tobias admits to some trepidation before beginning; but the experience was an unqualified success, as his award for most improved attests.

And Chloë happily releases her morning cloaks as they emerge from the chrysalis.

Part of the reason camp is so appealing to children across the board is that represents play, school work, camp is voluntary, school is compulsory, camp represents a break from school not vice versa. Part of the reason is the culture of childhood (yes, there is a culture of childhood which we adults tend to forget) which frowns on school and smiles at camp. Camp is nature, school is artifice, camp is abandon, school is civilization. Think of Huckleberry Finn and his escape from civil society - duty, obligation - to the halcyon life of the river.

But in the final analysis the question remains: why can't school be more like camp? College certainly is. (Indeed, without being cynical one might wonder if higher ed is too much like camp. Non-compulsory to a fault, the typical undergraduate no longer graduates in four years.) In many respects high school, characterized by a plethora of electives is. Which leaves elementary school (middle school or junior high school is simply a no-man's-land, beyond the pale).

A true down-side of schooling occurs when students are actually turned off to learning, when for example a natural disposition to play with numbers and language - counting games and word games for example - is transmogrified into math or reading anxiety or worse yet, math- or reading phobia. Or a natural curiosity about pollywog ponds disappears altogether.

Particularly as elementary schools re-open their doors this fall, they should attend to Christopher's question of many years ago: why can't school be more like camp?

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.34
August 24, 2005

School boards and superintendents have always been confronted with tough questions, but today they face a novel set of technical policy and practice questions which are truly daunting. They fall under the heading of what we in the US call IT (information technology) or in the EU ICT (infrastructure, content and training).

They are daunting because the stakes are so high, administrative, political, financial and academic. A wrong turn is costly in each dimension. The cost of acquiring IT is itself significant, particularly when budgets are tight. And the opportunity costs are high as well - since you can only spend money once, every decision to spend on “x” is a decision to forgo spending on “y.” Perhaps most painful is the prospect of headlines about acquiring the “wrong” technology; is there a superintendent or board member who does not live in dread of the fickle finger of fate award?

More to the point, intellectual resources are involved, both in the case of decision makers (who decides) and in the case of students and teachers (who benefits, by what metrics)?

What have we learned about this linked set of questions? How can a lay-board and a non-technical superintendent make prudent decisions in a complex and rapidly changing arena?

Part of the answer is that any technology should improve academic instruction and increase academic outcomes. Another part is that over time technology should pay for itself - it should increase productivity in an amount greater than its cost.

Easy to say, hard to do. All this in the context of the political truism: to paraphrase Clemenceau's famous dictum -- that war is too important to be left to generals -- big-time technical questions are too important to be left to technicians (exclusively).

What is the answer? A CIO (chief information officer).

CIO's are nearly ubiquitous in the private sector because information (data) is power. And it is specially powerful when it is abundant, reliable and instantaneously accessible.

The CIO has many responsibilities, most obviously for hardware, software and broadband selection, acquisition and maintenance - a major job in itself -- less obviously but no less important is interfacing with the substantive parts of the organization. That is where the rubber meets the road, because truth be told IT is just a tool - powerful and fancy to be sure - but still a tool, to be used in service to other objectives. The Superintendent or board member who forgets this simple truism invites not just problems, but disaster. That is why the CIO must know in her bones that IT must justify itself by the academic fruit it bears, by the convenience it affords and the productivity it enhances.

Thus, the CIO's real measure of IT is not the size or scope of district LAN's or WAN's or PAN's (personal area networks e.g., Bluetooth), pipeline size or gigahertz of memory but improved instruction and increased academic outcomes.

Not surprisingly, then, the CIO's job description is a tricky one: it is a work in progress. The CIO must have a deep and broad technical background (though not necessarily be an engineer); the CIO must know a good deal about curriculum and instruction (or be a very insightful and a very quick study); the CIO must be a student of organizational culture as well. And she must have the skills of a diplomat, the patience of a Saint and nerves of steel. Indeed, the CIO is the embodiment of the tension between art and science, or, if you will, right and left brain.

As I said in an earlier View Point, on the negative side of the ledger the CIO must protect the Superintendent and Board from making mistakes - investing in the wrong hardware and software can be costly in more ways than one. In terms of morale, for example, IT that is neither user friendly nor user useful sinks like stone. The press loves stories about IT disasters and rare is the Superintendent or Board that is qualified to pass judgment on such arcane but important matters absent expert, unbiased advice. Great faith and confidence must repose in the CIO.

On the positive side of the ledger, the CIO is emblematic as well as real, representing a fresh vision of what schooling can become in the future. Such a person -- new to the traditional school hierarchy -- can help chart a new course. Happily, when the tension inherent in IT applications is successfully resolved not only does the CIO fly high and straight but the larger school community does as well.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.33, no. 121
8/19/2005

The USDoE's National Education Technology Plan 2004 is so ambitiously titled -- Toward a New Golden Age in American Education - that it actually distracts from the subject. In my case, at least, it impels me backwards rather than forward: was there ever a golden age in American education or is this an example of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous definition of nostalgia: being sentimental about something that never was?

Where one stands on this issue depends on where one sits, and my earliest memories of public schooling are not exactly golden. For example, I so disliked pre-school that I refused to attend Kindergarten (my sit-out was indulged by my progressive mother, who I assume assumed that I would break down and join my friends as they paraded off to school. Even at five I was a mountain of adamant and steadfastly refused to go to Kindergarten at all.)

Now Kindergarten is at least symbolically important because it was a part of the endless skein of education reform that has characterize American schooling from its earliest days. A learned and humane import from Germany -- to which the name bears witness -- if Kindergarten was not part of the Golden Age I don't know what was.

To be sure there were golden policy moments. The very invention of mass education in the early 19th century was priceless, and the land grant colleges of the mid-19th century were 18 karat. So too was the GI Bill, and while Brown v Board of Education was certainly a golden moment it was golden precisely because it signaled the end of an era so badly tarnished by institutionalized racism that half a century later we still await its full promise.

So you will forgive me if I have a hard time with golden ages of education. But I do not mean to be mean spirited and will stipulate that technology could usher in a golden age if not another golden age.

With that in mind, permit me to sketch-in my vision of what technology could do by drawing on another golden age, the Golden Age of Classical Greece. Perhaps it is the virtue of hindsight that makes it look so good, but its reputation has held up over the past two millennia. My favorite example from the period is Philip of Macedon's choice of a royal tutor for his son Alexander: Aristotle. Hard to beat, and a model that could stand us in good stead if we take it seriously. That, at least, is how I view the promise of high technology. Not just speed and quantity - a high pressure fire hose of content -- but personalized, high quality content. In a word, high technology holds the promise of mass customization of both instruction and learning.

High technology owes low technology a debt, for it was low technology that gave us the factory model of mass education. The mass produced text book, cheap paper, the heated (and now air conditioned) class room, the PA system, the machine scored test, the electric clock and the ball point pen were technology fixes of their own, just as the overhead projector, film strip and language lab were. Taken together they made mass education possible. At a more elevated level, as Peter Drucker reminds us, the triumph of the industrial era was moving workers to their work; the promise of the post-industrial era is moving work to workers.

And that is precisely what high technology can do; not only move the locus of education to the learner, when she needs it as well as how she needs it. High technology holds within itself the promise of both quality and quantity, an Hegelian synthesis of thesis and antithesis, tailored to the needs and capacities of the teacher and the learner.

And high tech fixes fall across administrative and academic spectra. With high technology, tracking student performance over time - in real time - is potentially a diagnostic triumph, not just an accountability menace. So too is finely calibrated content delivery and assessment. Both can reflect a diagnostic regime rather than ham-handed accountability, to the profit of student and school both.

To be sure, the industrial revolution made mass education possible because of economies of scale; at the time no one could imagine an individual tutor for each student. Till now, that is. (Indeed, the assembly line's purpose was to deliberately replace the individual craftsman.)

A final note: in thinking about a national technology plan it is important to remember that we are a continental democracy and common market of nearly 300 million souls and there is only so much a plan, national or otherwise, can deliver. But one thing this plan does provide: a vision of the future in which technology liberates and does not bind, soars and does not limit.

Denis P. Doyle
8/8/2005, no. 120

Would that education decision-making were a science: weigh, measure, count, analyze, decide. But decision-making is not so straightforward, even evidence-based decision-making. And it is not just the big decisions that are complex, reflecting a mix of the subjective and objective. Indeed, the little decisions are only “easy” because they are made so often that they emerge from habit rather than sober reflection.

Why? Because almost all foundational decisions are normative, they are based on values and attitudes as much as facts. Take reading and math, for example. How to teach them should be based on evidence (insofar as there is solid evidence) but whether or not to teach them at all is based on deeply held values about the importance of literacy and numeracy. As a society, we believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, and that certain kinds of knowledge are to be preferred to other kinds. Two examples drawn from the history of “public” education in the New World make the point.

The Old Deluder Satan Act of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1647) is the foundation upon which mass public education rests to this day. It required every township with a critical mass of students (fifty households) to raise funds for elementary schooling to teach reading. Why? Because in the protestant tradition the ability to read was essential; only personal knowledge of the scriptures would keep you safe from Satan’s entreaties. (The Act begins: “it being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures...”)

Fast forward to the early 19th century and meet Noah Webster, lexicographer and patriot. Concerned about irregularities in language usage, Webster began his monumental task of creating the dictionary that still bears his name. But he was not content with mere regularization of usage: he was above all a patriot and wanted to institutionalize American English as distinct from English English. Thus, labor not labour, neighbor not neighbour and so on. His point was to distinguish us from our colonial forebears, an ambitious task to be sure.

My point is that the big decisions are almost always made on normative grounds, be they political, cultural, even religious.

Fast forward further – to the present – and think about decision-making in the modern school setting. Take as an example, English as a second language. How to teach English as a second language is properly informed by evidence; indeed, the more we know about what works the better, but the underlying decision to teach all Americans English is above all a normative decision about American political, social and economic life.

The fact that knowledge of a common language in a great continental democracy and continental common market is a singular advantage is not to be disparaged. It is a social, political and cultural solvent without peer. But neither is the fact that the decision to teach it is not evidence-based (even though how to teach it should be.)

Is this a distinction with a meaning? I think so. My grandfather (a Flemish-speaker from Antwerp) would not permit Flemish in the home (though my grandmother never learned a word of English and we communicated as much by telepathy as speech). As a result, my mother’s generation spoke Flemish (but did not read or writer Flemish) and my generation is illiterate in Flemish (except for a few rhymes that are buried in childhood memory).

My wife’s family was much the same – her Spanish grandparents never learned English -- and though her Mexican grandparents were bilingual (as is she and her parents) our children have had to return to school to learn Spanish. The decision to learn Spanish is based on some evidence – being bilingual is better than twice as good as being monolingual by my calculus – but the underlying decision is as much subjective as objective.

So it goes. It is a fact that no language has greater utility than English (which is why it is the official second language of more people than it is a first language!); that is the fact of the matter. But requiring knowledge of a specific language as a condition of citizenship is an act of nation building. A worthwhile act, I might add, but as much subjective as objective.

A final example should suffice – while reading instruction should be evidence-based – (what works best with which students) what we read is a reflection of what we value. Rare is the person who sits down for a good, leisurely read of the phone book; the phone book is instrumental. You read it to gather specific information and close it as quickly as you can. Not so Harry Potter, as millions or readers would attest to.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.31, no. 119
8/3/2005

Why does education data make educators so uncomfortable? To only slightly exaggerate, for the past 150 years data was something a third party required you to gather about yourself so they could embarrass you with it three months later. Or so teachers and administrators believed. Data was something higher-ups would use to catch you doing something wrong.

No longer. As Montgomery County MD Superintendent Jerry Weast elegantly says, in his district, he uses data to catch you doing something right. That’s the good news. The better news is that the idea is catching on.

For example, Springboard Schools, a California-based school improvement consortium which began in the San Francisco Bay Area, has recently completed a major study of consistently high performing schools to find out what they’re doing right. (See www.springboardschools.org.) In the first instance, what’s really interesting about the schools they studied is their demographics – they are uniformly poor (in some of the schools studied, 100% of the students were eligible for free lunch) and uniformly high minority; most had high concentrations of English language learners. And none of the schools in the study had extra resources.

Talk about bad luck: three strikes against them to begin with. (If three seems to be an unlucky number there may be a good reason: in the First World War, for example, “three on a match” was bad luck because it took a waiting sniper as long as the match passed from the first to the second person to pick off the third smoker.)

Whatever. High poverty, high minority enrolment and a paucity of resources are three characteristics that too often predict low performing schools, just as wealth, low minority enrollment and extra resources frequently predict high academic performance.

Among other things, Springboard conducts The California Best Practices Study; “currently underway, (it) investigates the practices of high-performing districts and schools in California that serve large percentages of students in poverty, students of color and English language learners.”

Springboard’s findings?

Like death and taxes, a perennial issue in public education is teacher pay. By and large teachers think they are under-paid, taxpayers think they are, if anything, over-paid. It was ever thus. The reason is not hard to fathom: as famed education economist Charles Benson – now unhappily gone to his reward – used to say, teaching is simultaneously the most underpaid and overpaid of the professions: thanks to the uniform salary schedule we pay the worst what we pay the best . In the rest of the economy we at least go through the motions of linking pay to performance.

The problem exists in teaching not because we do not recognize that some teachers are better than others – think back and remember the great teachers you had -- but because we have no universally accepted metrics to measure teacher performance. What constitutes superior teaching? Much of it is subjective – the power to motivate, inspire and encourage are a part of great teaching. A supreme command of the subject is key as well. Communication skills are critical. A flair for the dramatic helps. And a strong dose of selflessness goes a long way.

In large measure the problem is a function of scale and historical accident: by any measure the enterprise is simply huge. Of nearly 300 million Americans, nearly 60 million are elementary and secondary school students. Of a national workforce of over 14o million workers, 3.4 million teachers are employed by public and private schools (a 22% increase over the past ten years). That’s mass education. And the enterprise is “socialized,” which is to say it is largely provided by government. (Ironically, the non-socialized portion, about ten percent of the nation’s students and teachers, pays its teachers less than government does. In the other professions, the private sector pays better than the public.)

What we sow we reap. The historical part of the problem is the factory model of education and its attendant emphasis on teacher proofing the school. In the early days of mass education there was a self-conscious decision made that almost anyone could “teach.” If the conditions were right, and the curriculum and supervision consistent, who actually stood in front of the students made little if any difference. Teachers worked on an assembly line in which they too were interchangeable parts.

But if this was ever true, it no longer is. Division of labor and specialization of function has gone to school, and value added is today’s watch word. (The general term value added means the additional value imparted by a program, process, curriculum, text book or teacher. Does having Ms. Smith as a teacher -- rather than Mr. Jones -- make a difference to student outcomes? Does textbook “X” lead to higher levels of academic performance than textbook “Y?” In the narrower world of education reform, the term value added is generally restricted to the impact of the teacher on student outcomes.)

Policy makers in particular have been struggling to identify metrics that would be widely accepted as reasonable and fair to determine which teachers make a difference (and why they do). If a system can be found that does this, the payoff is potentially great. Struggling students could be assigned to high-value add teachers, and high-value add teachers could be paid more. The Gordian Knot of pay for performance could be cut.

What can be done while value added assessment comes of age? One thing stands out, and that is market sensitive pay for scarcity. Try a thought experiment. Too few physics or math teachers? Pay physics and math teachers more. That’s what we do for football coaches, and what’s good enough for sports should be good enough for science and mathematics.

Having said this, there is a more subtle form of payment that must be factored in and that is what economists call psychic income, the pleasure one derives from being well prepared and doing a job well. Physicists and mathematicians are not by temperament baby-sitters, and the custodial dimension of teaching must yield to its academic demands. No teacher should have to endure student indifference, abuse or hostility – certainly not physics and math teachers – and the disciplinary burden should be lifted. Put most simply, physics and math (and countless other courses) should be an elective.

And the preparation burden should be lifted as well – that is, physics and math teachers should not be expected to sit through education courses as a condition of being licensed to teach. Private school teachers don’t; neither should public school teachers.

And lo and behold, what’s good enough for physics and math teachers may prove to be good enough for other teachers as well.

Denis P Doyle

7/20/2005

Every few years the business community gets a bee in its bonnet about education, and for good reason. Good schools are the lifeblood not just of communities of scholarship but of business as well. The interest of business, I should add, is, mercifully, entirely self-serving: philanthropy (love of man, from the Greek) is not the issue. What is?

First of all is an educated work-force. As former Xerox CEO David Kearns said, “if the schools educate, business will train.” By this he meant a broad, general education which included the visible curriculum – course content such as plane geometry, English Lit, and physics – and the invisible curriculum: work ethic, tolerance of differences, ability to work in teams. Young adults who are fluent readers and speakers of English, who know the fundamentals of math, and are prepared to work hard, are eminently employable. If they are creative and innovative, so much the better.

Second – and equally important – is an educated citizenry, both as consumers and voters. You can’t sell high-tech gadget in a low-tech world, and a dull electorate invites cynicism and eventual decay and disorder.

Third – and almost as important – is education as an amenity. Not just corporate HQ but factories and high tech assembly facilities need to be near first-rate schools to attract and hold first-rate employees.

What are examples of business activities that have a direct bearing on schooling? In today’s climate two examples come immediately to mind, PD and drop-outs.

First PD (professional development). All successful businesses invest in PD. The operative word is invest . Although PD may show up as a line-item in operating budgets, it is an investment in the strict sense of the term: its purpose is to produce lasting improvements in productivity. All the better if it makes people feel good, but PD’s principal purpose is to improve the bottom line.

Granted, schools are not businesses but they too have a bottom line: academic performance. The ultimate purpose of PD must be to improve academic outcomes. Indeed, that is what value-added is all about: what difference does a teacher (or program or IT) make?

Closer to home is the issue of drop-outs, which has been very much in the news, particularly intimations that some school districts may be cooking the numbers in the hope of looking better.

To use a business metaphor, drop-outs are a school’s most important customer. Important in the sense that they are sending a message – thanks but no thanks. They’ve tried it and don’t like it.

Think of it from a business perspective: loyal uncomplaining clients are welcome but they don’t give much insight into what the firm is doing right and wrong; critical but loyal customers who stick it out may be a pain in the neck but in the final analysis help inform the firm; but the most important customer is the one who abandons the firm without a word of explanation. Important because underlying that behavior is gold; that customer has discerned something so wrong with your product or service that they don’t give you the courtesy of an explanation! The firm that can understand and regain that customer is the firm that will prosper in the market.

The school drop-out is the case in point, and compulsory attendance – particularly truancy laws – misses the point. A school that can only hold students by coercion is an un-healthy institution. The question schools should ask is not why some students drop out, but why some stay. Indeed, I am convinced that compulsory attendance is a snare and a delusion: it should be eliminated for anyone over 14. To be sure, kids who are 14+ should not be abandoned, but schools should exert a positive pull, not a negative push. Rather, replace compulsory attendance with guaranteed access to high-demand, high-satisfaction programs which will lead to a high-quality degree.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.28 no. 116
7/13/2005

There’s so much right about NCLB that it seems mean-spirited to even raise the question, what’s wrong with NCLB. What’s overwhelmingly right, of course, is that it forces us to squarely address the question of who should be left behind, on both moral and practical grounds.

There can be no quarrel with the moral argument no one, certainly not the least among us, should be left behind. But moral arguments have more rhetorical force than political punch. For political power pick a practical and pragmatic reason: economic growth and development. This is, of course, an old refrain, popularized by A Nation at Risk and the policy statement Investing in Our Children (by the Committee for Economic Development) nearly two decades ago (for which I was study co-director with Marsha Levine).

Indeed, the pragmatic argument is self-evidently compelling, surfacing most recently in the work of NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman: put most simply, graduates of even Americas most distinguished high schools such as NY’s Peter Steuyvesant (which numbers Al Shanker among its alumni) or Bronx School of Science (which includes NY Times Magazine columnist and former Nixon speech writer Bill Safire among its alumni) no longer compete exclusively with each other. They compete on a global basis, with Bangalore, Paris, and London.

What has this to do with criticizing NCLB? If its purposes are noble and the metrics good enough for government work what’s wrong with it? Some critics say it’s not funded adequately, but t’was ever thus. Can anyone remember a social program – health, education or welfare – that was? Arguing that NCLB is not funded adequately is a squishy proposition at best: what were schools supposed to be doing all this time if not imparting basic academic skills to all students?

Teaching to the test is another criticism leveled at NCLB. If the test is bad teaching to it is bad pedagogy, just as dispensing medicine with bad tests is bad practice. Change the test not the requirement. As every student and teacher knows from experience an embedded assessment is the learning opportunity par excellence. Catch a mistake when it occurs and there’s a good chance that it’s corrected for life. Celebrate a success when it occurs and you’ve got a friend for life.

Having said this, one legitimate criticism of NCLB remains: it’s testing and measurement regime reinforces the factory model of schooling by reinforcing age and grade grouping of students.

The grand opportunity inherent in NCLB is to establish a standards-based learning regime, in which students move at their own pace following a learning trajectory consistent with their capacities, interests and motivation.

Imagine an academic decathlon which requires successful passage as the condition of earning a diploma. My vision is that every student would have to post passing scores in ten areas: ELA, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, Foreign Language, Art, Music, Health and Physical Fitness, IT applications and community service. Remember, in a decathlon you don’t have to be a super star in everything (though it doesn’t hurt) but you must achieve an adequate composite score.

Testing or assessment could be variable and creative – a demonstration in art or music, a thoughtful essay to document community service, solving problem sets in math, evidence of reading, writing and speaking facility in a second language, for example. There could – indeed should – be interdisciplinary opportunities: demonstrate IT facility by using word processing skills in English comp classes, or spreadsheet facility in Social Science or Science.

Such a decathlon would have publicly set and publicly posted standards and measures, precisely as scouting merit badges do. Each student would pick his or her targets and go for them; the highly motivated and talented would cross the finish line early, the regular among us would set a pace that would probably look like a good high school today, and those that needed extra time or motivation would take a little longer. But everyone would have their fair chance to compete and win. Cleveland’s Donna Snodgrass calls it failure-free education and she’s right.

The youngster from an non-English speaking background would get more time on task, and the faculty brat would take less (having been raised in a time-on-task environment to begin with). Indeed, such an environment would be the operational expression of the apocryphal story told about Harvard’s famous President Elliot: when asked why Harvard was such an extraordinary repository of knowledge, he is reported to have said “because when our students arrive they bring so much with them and they take so little when they leave.”

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.27, no. 115
7/7/2005

Two intertwined terms are becoming part of education culture: data-driven decision-making and scientifically-based-research. Taken for granted in the high tech world, the terms are coming of age in the education community. It is about time, such sensible ideas are long overdue. Evidence and the data which comprises it is preferred to flying by the seat of your pants. 

The opportunity and the challenge facing today’s education decision maker is to move beyond decision making by intuition to what I have begun to call knowledge-based decision-making. By this I include data-driven decision-making but I mean more than that. Today’s education leader – whether the leader of the school district, the school building or the classroom – must change data into knowledge, transform knowledge into wisdom, and use wisdom as a guide to action. But if data-driven decision-making and scientifically-based research are the necessary preconditions to wise decision-making, they are not sufficient. True, without data and solid evidence the modern decision maker is helpless, but simply possessing data and evidence is no guarantee of success.

There are three reasons. First, as every educator knows, schools are awash in data but without purposeful organization and the capacity for nearly instantaneous recall and analysis it is virtually useless. And nowhere is Parkinson’s last law -- “delay is the deadliest form of denial” – more apt. The most extreme example is the state mandated test taken in the spring with results not available until the following fall. And in a larger context, few schools have the IT (information technology) infrastructure – hard ware, software, trained personnel – to take advantage of the power inherent in school data.

Second, for most educators, data has been and remains a burden not an asset. Compliance data is used for precisely that – to see whether or not you hewed to the rules and regulations. Historically, education data was something a third party told you to gather so they could embarrass you with it later. Or so many educators believed. No wonder data sat in cardboard file boxes, hidden away and largely unused, except for mandated compliance reporting. With little incentive to use it wisely and well, data, like any other unwanted artifact, gathers dust.

Third, and perhaps most important, “the technology is easy, the culture is hard.” Any major cultural shift is difficult, in any organization. Only the strongest incentives to make a cultural shift have an effect and in schools such incentives are few and weak. Because data has been used historically to point the finger of blame, it is difficult to convince educators that the next round of data collection will be used as a resource, as an opportunity to trumpet successes and seize opportunities. Once burned, twice shy. Or as Mark Twain famously said, a cat won’t sit on a hot stove twice and it won’t sit on a cold one again either.

Tension about data collection occurs, then, because there are two broad streams of data use, one a carrot, one a stick; the same data – attendance, demographics, test scores, teacher characteristics, school spending, course taking patterns – can be used for diagnostic or accountability purposes (or both). For example, disaggregating test scores by identifiable groups of youngsters can provide the key to either better instruction or finger pointing (or both). In an ideal world, such data would always be used for diagnostic and prescriptive purposes, not recriminations or blame. No one wants to be a bad or ineffective teacher so data – in theory – offers an unparalleled opportunity to improve practice. But that connection must be made or the teacher whose kids do not do well on standardized tests is left high and dry (as are his or her students).

Having said this, it is important to re-emphasize the fact that data-driven decision-making is the foundational activity that underlies The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). In an age of hyperbole and exaggeration it is hard to make the point convincingly, but NCLB is to this generation what ESEA was to mine. Not to put to fine a point on it, schools gathered data for 150 years and rarely used it (except for compliance purposes); now NCLB schools are now required by law to use data. They must use data to change organizational and individual behavior and they must use data to chance academic outcomes. That is a tall but necessary order. And it will take time for it to work, particularly as educators see NCLB as more stick than carrot.

Peter Drucker observes that the task of education is to make ordinary people do extraordinary things. He is right. But to do this on a large scale requires systematic approaches to problem solving. In the world of education, “knowledge based decision making” is, of necessity, a blend of data-driven decision-making and professional judgment, just as it is in medicine. It is not a matter of perfect decision making scientifically arrived at: it is a matter of consistently good decision making over time. Indeed, as political scientists know, waiting for perfect decisions makes “the perfect the enemy of the good.”

The secret is to seek as good information as can be found, analyze it, and change or modify interventions as appropriate. For example, Title I programs do not have to be “pull out” programs; inventive and resourceful schools have begun to offer them as after school programs. The idea makes pedagogical and social sense and is certainly worth trying. But if the decision to do so is not based on research – as it need not be, particularly as research findings are weak or inconclusive – the decision to continue the practice should be. The practice is worth studying.

Let me close with a final and compelling medical example, drawn from a book by surgeon Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (Metropolitan Books. Henry Holt and Company: New York. 2002.) A New Yorker staff writer on medicine and science, Gawande makes the medical case for blending scientific knowledge and professional judgment much as I have tried to make the education case (though he with greater elegance and grace). His book title, Gawande tells us, comes “from my concern with the larger uncertainties and dilemmas that underlie what we do.” He goes on to observe that “what seems most vital and interesting is not how much we in medicine know but how much we don’t – and how we might grapple with that ignorance more wisely.”

I commend the book in its entirety to anyone interested in improving education practice, but the most salient single point for educators is the M & M Conference (Morbidity and Mortality). Typically held each week – at least at teaching hospitals – the M & M Conference gives doctors the opportunity to talk openly about what went wrong – including errors of judgment or out-and-out mistakes -- without fear of either legal harassment or professional disapprobation. That everyone makes mistakes is a given – to make mistakes a powerful learning tool, however, requires a special setting, one in which they can be admitted, discussed and analyzed. That is what the M & M conference is all about and that is the difference between using data for diagnosis and using data for accountability.

If educators were to make one learned borrowing from medicine that would be it: knowledge-based decision-making, a blend of scientific evidence – based on data – and hard-won professional judgment, which, taken together is that mix of intuition, insight and experience that we think of as wisdom.

Denis P. Doyle
June 5, 2005

From mass education to mass customization was the theme of EduStat Summit 2005 and the participants, panelists and speakers lived up to the advance billing. In the best high tech manner, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings greeted the summiteers with a full-motion, living-color, surround-sound welcome video, the next best thing to being there in person. (See www.edustat.com for more detailed information.)

Keynoter Paul Vallas, Philadelphia’s education CEO had much to celebrate – data-driven decision-making is bearing fruit as Philadelphia test scores have climbed and the achievement gap narrowed for two years in a row (indeed, test scores released a few days after EduStat showed solid third year gains as well.)

This year, thirty-five presenters and panelists held the attention of more than 125 participants through a day and one-half of interactive set of conversations (compared to half that number for the first EduStat Summit 2004). But the highlight of the Summit was clearly the dinner cruise to the Statue of Liberty, stunningly beautiful, fully illuminated, a reminder of what we have come through and what we have to look forward to. She made a perfect point-counterpoint to the work of the Summit.

Everyone had their favorite moments at the Summit, and although the competition was tough (and I didn’t get to hear all the presenters) the intellectual and administrative highlights for me were two: Corpus Christie’s Katherine Conoly’s presentation and Montgomery County MD’s John Porter’s award. First, Katherine.

Speaking from deep experience, she was emblematic of the many speakers and panelists providing larger insights on the basis of hands-on experience. Using Corpus Christie’s example, she traced the path from technology adoption to implementation to maintenance. If she were an anthropologist she might have titled her talk cultural diffusion, the term of art to describe how culture changes over time, including expected (planned) consequences and un-expected consequences. And although her text was drawn from her unique Corpus Christi experience, it was the generalizability of her findings that were most telling.

Indeed, one superintendent among many members of an overflow audience (an old friend who is a self-proclaimed anti-technologist, Reynoldsburg Ohio’s Dick Ross), was mesmerized. After Katherine’s presentation he was overheard (by me) talking to his CFO telling him to talk to her! Katherine brought the human story of change management to life, giving real meaning to the SchoolNet mantra that the technology is easy, the culture is hard.

Different presenters will have different memories, of course, and in the interest of full disclosure, I must issue two disclaimers. First, as the co-founder of SchoolNet (EduStat’s principal sponsor for a list of the other sponsors see www.edustat.com), I was completely and deliberately in the dark about the education CIO of the year award which was conferred Thursday evening.

Twenty-one education CIO’s were in the running but the secret was closely guarded until the award itself. Not only did this maintain some suspense the process was designed by SchoolNet to be sure that there would be no favoritism (or, in Washington terms, even better yet, no appearance of favoritism).

Second, not only am I a resident of the CIO winner’s district, Montgomery County MD, I am an alumnus of the district as well. It was with special personal pleasure, then, that I learned that the winner was Montgomery County’s CIO, John Porter.

My personal pleasure in learning that John Porter had been selected was equaled by my professional satisfaction, because two years ago, writing in the Phi Delta Kappan, I had highlighted the very different (yet productive) experiences two very different districts had with data-driven decision-making, Montgomery County MD and LA City Unified. Titled in reverse order of importance -- Accountability, Diagnostics and IT-- it made the case for IT as the necessary but not sufficient condition for meaningful diagnostics and diagnostics as the necessary but not sufficient condition of any meaningful accountability system. (See the linked PDF file)

The key to this three-legged stool? The education CIO, the person who recognizes the importance of numbers and what to do with them. Not to put too fine a point on it, that the CIO of my alma mater got the CIO of the year feels good!

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 5.25, no 113
6/22/2005

Thomas Friedman’s newest book, The World is Flat (which I reviewed last week) bears revisiting, in one particular – the radical transformation of the role and location of human capital in the modern global economy. Not only is human capital more important than ever before, you no longer have to be “there” (or “here”) to deploy it. Indeed, domestic telecommuting is by now old hat. If your boss doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) you can work from the beach as easily as from home. Many haute tech workers already skip going to the office altogether, saving time, money and wear and tear. Friedman’s point, however, is that you can work from India as easily as from Indiana, from Moscow Idaho as easily as Moscow Russia, from Cairo Illinois as easily as Cairo Egypt.

To begin at the beginning, human capital is the economist’s term of art to describe the mix of knowledge, skills, talents, aptitudes and dispositions that reside in the human being. (As distinct from the wealth embodied in physical capital, gold, oil, buildings, infrastructure. In a sense, of course, everything can be defined in terms of human capital: oil is simply sticky black goo until human beings figure out a way to use it. Alternately, all that glitters is not gold.)

The qualitative difference is that human capital can be nurtured and created through formal and informal education. Most formal education takes place in schools and on the job, while most informal education takes place in the home and the immediate community. Typically, students learn algebra or a second language in school, and the fundamentals of their first language at home. And while your “ear” for grammar is acquired in the cradle, formal syntax rules are typically learned in school.

Fundamental attitudes toward life and work are acquired at home and its environs as well: work ethic, for example, or sense of humor, toleration of and respect for differences, self-respect, and democratic practices originates in the home and the immediate culture.

Who is to say which is most important, knowledge or attitude? In its path breaking policy statement released more than a decade ago – Investing in Our Children -- the Committee for Economic Development gave nearly equal weight to what it called the visible curriculum and the invisible curriculum. They mean by these terms what is taught and learned in school (content such as English Lit or physics) and attitudes and dispositions that are acquired without direct instruction, toleration and self respect, for example. (As Quakers day, values are caught, not taught!).

To be sure, there is some blurring at the edges: democratic values can be learned and reinforced in school through such activities as student government and a second language or a skill like chess can be acquired at home, if mom or dad or a relative or friend is knowledgeable.

Combine two traits, however – deep knowledge and skill with powerful motivation – and transforming activity ensues. John Locke famously defined private property as the sum of man’s labor and nature’s bounty; today labor and natural wealth are frequently found in the same place, the individual. Add one more piece to the mix – instantaneous communication – and a quantum change occurs. Today, knowledge work can be performed wherever there are workers. Indeed, there are strong incentives – economic, cultural, aesthetic to name only three – to work from “home,” whether it is literally home or the home region.

In this new scenario, some workers will still move to their work – witness concentrations of IT workers in Silicon Valley, Bangalore or Silicon Glen (in Scotland) – but countless workers need not move at all. And countless others need not move very far. Indians from Delhi no longer need to move to Palo Alto and Americans who want to can move to Bangalore to see it first hand (as Friedman’s datelined piece in the June 8, 2005 NY Times observes.)

What this means for education and society at-large is conceptually clear (even if the practical implications are still somewhat murky): when Bangalore competes with Beijing, Palo Alto and New York, the human capital competition is truly global. Not only are Harvard, Stanford and MIT competing with each other, they are competing with the Sorbonne, Fudan University in China and Oxford. But even more important, Bronx HS of Science is competing not just with Lowell in SF, Central in Philadelphia and Brooklyn Tech across town, but every high school on the planet.

The long and short of it is that emerging Indian, Japanese and Chinese pre-eminence in mathematics and science is no longer just a curiosity; it is a powerful competitive advantage (note that none of the three examples produce a classic example of physical capital, oil). Finally, even Chinese pre-eminence in light manufacturing, assembly and textiles is a function of rapidly developing human capital not just rock-bottom wages: design, manufacturing, assembly, marketing, distribution and delivery of finished product remain critically important components in the 21st century (just as they were in the last).

On Flag Day, it is properly emblematic to remember that low wages and natural resources are not enough. Developed human capital – forged at home, in the larger culture and in school -- is the key to long-term growth.

Denis P. Doyle
Issue 6.24, no. 112
6/14/2005

At nearly 500 pages (and copyrighted in 2005) Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is neither brief nor history. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: NY, 2005.) But it’s a good read nonetheless. Indeed, it’s a necessary read for anyone who is concerned about our place in the world, our long-term economic prospects and the pressing need to improve our schools. A peripatetic traveler and indefatigable reporter (with an insatiable appetite for stories), Friedman’s style is conversational and chatty, his insights penetrating. Nothing dry or academic about his prose or his approach. It is a book that can be read on the run, skimmed and re-skimmed or read straight through (on a long airplane flight). However you tackle it, The World is Flat pays handsome dividends.

A recent development at home – the Scripps sponsored national Spelling Bee that concluded last week – offers a small-scale but tidy point-counter-point to Freidman’s big picture. Won again by an Indian-American (the top three finishers were all Indian-American) it’s an unexpected commentary on Christopher Columbus’ mistaken assumption that he’d reached India. India has reached us.

That’s actually the device that Friedman uses to introduce his thesis: Columbus’ great insight was that you could sail west to reach the east – so long as the world is round. His mistake – if it was that – was misjudging the distance (and not guessing that an intervening land-mass -- North and South America to be precise – blocked his route to India).

The fabled spices of the east were Columbus’ objective; the Portuguese were beating their way around the horn and ascendant Muslim powers controlled the land routes. Ferdinand and Isabel – who had just driven the Muslims out of Spain – bankrolled Columbus’ expedition.

Fast forward 500 years and Friedman is in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. What’s happened in the intervening time period? For starters, the Indians are still at the top of their mathematics game – they not only invented the concept of “0”, they attend to mathematics education. Even more important, however, are a set of events that came together in the year 2000. According to Friedman interlocutor, Nandan Nilekani,

The Public Interest magazine turned 40 this year and decided to fold up its tent. After four decades of distinguished service it has closed its doors and ceased publication. I greet the news with mixed emotions; on the one hand I am impressed with the editors’ boldness and intrepidity – the sheer nerve – to close after one of the great runs in magazine publishing. How hard to quit when you’re ahead. On the other I have a sense of inestimable loss. I grew up with The Public Interest and losing it is like losing a member of the family.

I remember the maiden issue as though it were yesterday. After five years of higher education – three semesters at Oberlin College and an AB and MA earned at Berkeley – I was working as a committee consultant in the legislative vineyards in Sacramento. (My first boss was George Miller Senior, not to be confused with his son, NCLB co-architect George Miller Junior. Miller Senior, a liberal democrat from Richmond CA was either the first, second or third most powerful man in California, depending on where you placed the real Governor Brown (Pat, Governor Moonbeam’s father) and Jesse Unruh, fabled Speaker of the House.)

California was coming into its own – with the nation’s greatest university system (remember Clark Kerr’s Multiversity?), the nation’s premier highway system (not to mention the best weather in the country), and only 18 million people: it was heaven on earth. (Governor Brown was boasting that California would soon reach 20 million!) Indeed, the California aqueduct – Pat Brown’s great triumph – was so enormous that, like the Great Wall of China, it was supposed to be visible with the naked eye from the moon itself.

Sacramento was a different matter. Fascinating to a political junkie, it was, unhappily like many state capitals, an intellectual wasteland (this was in the days when a national issue of The New York Times was still a gleam in the eye.) Enter The Public Interest. It was my salvation. Each quarter I read each issue cover-to-cover and saved them all, back-issue after back-issue.

In particular I remember the thrill of discovering counterintuitive articles, free of cant and dogma, which bored-in on solutions to social problems. It was through The Public Interest that I was later to literally meet the authors, Irving Kristol (known as St. Irving to his legions of admirers), Pat Moynihan, Jim Wilson, Nat Glazer, Jim Coleman, Sandy Jencks and others either too numerous to mention or now forgotten.

With its subscription list hovering around 14 thousand subscribers year after year The Public Interest never reached commercial critical mass, but no magazine before or since has been so influenced domestic policy. (As a matter of editorial policy, the magazine did not deal with foreign policy issues, a blessing in retrospect – Viet Nam might have rent the magazine’s fabric as it did the nations.)

Like modern art, perhaps, as important as what is there is what is not; in the farewell issue and in the obituaries I have read one story is missing. Its absence is such that it may mean that it is apocryphal, but it is no less powerful for that. Identified as a neo-conservative enterprise, Public Interest cofounder Irving Kristol was asked what was the definition of a neo-conservative: a liberal who has been mugged by reality he reportedly replied. Whether or not he said it, the idea still resonates: how true it was, how true it is.

Other memories surface as I think about The Public Interest: in a fever of spring cleaning several years ago I reluctantly concluded that I no longer could keep my set of back issues, consuming more-and-more of my limited shelf space. But I could no more throw them out than fly to the moon.

In a sign of the times The Public Interest had moved from New York to Washington and I called their editorial office with an offer: if they would pick them up, I would give them my complete set of back issues. My call was received with surprise and gratitude and a pick-up was effected that day. It remains my fond image that my copies of the magazine, so carefully read and saved over the years, found a happy home.

Denis P. Doyle
6/3/2005

The press, both print and electronic, is routinely criticized for lingering over bad news and virtually ignoring good news. Their defense in this ritualized debate is that they cover what their readers or viewers want (and what presents itself that is noteworthy.) But in a highly competitive media market, the reader/viewer gets the news he or she wants. To my knowledge, there is no media source that specializes in good news. From my standpoint, the issue is pretty straightforward; truth be told, in any given time frame, there is a lot more bad news than good. All the more reason to seize the moment when good news presents itself.

And last week reached a fever pitch of good news which we should all celebrate with huzzahs and hoorays. And, if I may be permitted, I will treat them as omens of what is to come.

First was the announcement of the discovery of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker fifty years after its last confirmed sighting. In an Arkansas swamp of all places.

Second was a ceremonial planting – on Arbor Day -- on the White House grounds of an American chestnut tree, a century after its apparent demise.

Among me earliest memories are family bird watching expeditions. With great fan-fare we would rise early and hike deep into the woods for a morning of bird watching and breakfast out-of-doors. Typically we would rendezvous with other birders and share sighting information. At the top of our list was the Pileated woodpecker, a cousin of the Ivory Bill – imposing it its own right, it was nonetheless overshadowed by the rumors that the Ivory Bill – with its three foot wingspan -- might not yet be extinct. I was genuinely thrilled by the recent announcement of a confirmed sighting. (See http://birds.cornell.edu/ivory/story2.htm for the full story.)

From fauna to flora, moving to the East Coast for third grade, I learned about the fabled American chestnut tree which had been wiped out by an Asian blight beginning in 1904. Within a few decades, 4 billion chestnuts died and the chestnut economy died with them. Until the end of the 19th century, the chestnut had provided a livelihood for countless thousands of subsistence farmers who harvested the nuts (or let their livestock feed on them, or both). The majestic chestnuts were not only beautiful shade trees – frequently reaching a height of 100 feet with a girth 5 or more feet in diameter -- they produced a wood virtually impervious to rot. There are still chestnut fences and buildings in service. And every year otherwise dead stumps send up suckers, trying heroically to return, only to be stricken once again. (For the full story, see the American Chestnut Foundation web-site http://www.acf.org/Chestnut_history.htm)

After nearly a century or research and experimentation, arborists have brought back the chestnut from the dead by cross-breeding American chestnut root stock with Asian chestnuts for hardiness and fungus resistance. The final verdict is not yet in, but it looks very promising.

With the sighting of the Ivory Bill and the return of the American chestnut I was reminded of Al Shanker’s infatuation with scouting and merit badges as the example par excellence of standards-based education. The standards for merit badges – ornithology and matters arboreal included -- are externally arrived-at and their mastery (or lack thereof) is measured by a disinterested third party. A scout earns a merit badge in his or her own time at his or her own pace. The standards are transparent and available to all. Harnessing external standards to external assessments to student motivation creates a powerful engine.

And the return of the Ivory Bill and the American chestnut are nothing if not inspirational, reminding us of the importance of constancy and fortitude. Hope does spring eternal. As to their immediate relevance to education and technology, both stories serve to remind us of the teachable moment and the relevant web-sites reveal once again the power of technology to bring the stories alive.

Denis P. Doyle
5/28/2005

The dauntless NY Times reminds us once again that it is the nation’s newspaper of record about NCLB as well as national and international news. (See Avi Salzman’s No Child Left Behind? Hardly, May 1, 2005.) Not surprisingly, NCLB remains in the news, a source of special consternation in states like Connecticut that are having a hard time meeting the tough standards NCLB has called for. (In fairness to Connecticut they have raised the bar high, forcing themselves to work hard for even modest gains.)

More significant than Connecticut’s concerns, however, is the NEA’s saber rattling. The nation’s largest teachers union, the NEA carries a big stick, and their unfunded-mandate suit represents a misconceived challenge to NCLB and all that it stands for.

The real issue is not that the NEA suit will win and roll NCLB back to ante bellum status, but the attitude the suit reveals. To understand what is wrong with such a suit, it is necessary to briefly go back in time.

Not long ago the driving education issues were equity and access, issues fueled by historic patterns of racial, ethnic and socio-economic isolation and segregation. More than an accident of neighborhood residence, segregation by race, ethnicity and income was a matter of public policy. It took Brown v Board to roll back racial and ethnic segregation and it took California’s Serrano v Priest to begin to roll back socio-economic isolation. (Because of the failure of Rodriguez, there was no tax-payer equity suit at the federal level comparable to Brown, and equity suits have of necessity taken a state-by-state route.)

So much for the courts. To give teeth to court decisions, legislative action is required. Enter ESEA, the centerpiece of LBJ’s War on Poverty, the source of billions of dollars in federal funding targeted for the poor and dispossessed. (There were similar legislative enactments at the state level, particularly in response to school finance equalization suits). To be sure, much remains to be done to assure full equity and access, but the policy die has been cast.

That is the short background of NCLB – it emerged full-blown from a long and honorable tradition of education reform committed to equity and access. Now it includes performance. It is worth spelling out the NCLB acronym (borrowed shamelessly from the Children’s Defense Fund): Leave No Child Behind? Access and equity, noble goals to be sure, are empty vessels if they do not translate into improved academic performance. What else are they about? That is why NCLB is so important and opposition to it so dismaying – there is no doubt that it needs improvement and polishing, but that is not the same as abolishing it. As Diane Ravitch said in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed: mend it don’t end it.

Truth be told, NCLB is about much more than dry legalisms, just as any important piece of legislation is. It represents the culmination of a long public discussion, in which ideas are debated until consensus emerges. NCLB was not the product of ideologues of the right or the left, it was not a special interest hobbyhorse, it was not produced by back-scratching and log-rolling. To the contrary, it was the product of decades of subterranean discussion and debate which welled-up in the Congress in 2000.

George Bush’s ascendancy was a cause of NCLB, not the ultimate reason. Mr. Bush was able to seek and find broadly-based bipartisan support because – to use the historian’s term of art – the climate of opinion had changed. Or to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term (from his eponymously titled book), the Tipping Point had been reached. Attitudes have charged irrevocably.

It is no accident that the principal architect of NCLB was Sandy Kress, not only a partner in Akin Gump (Bob Straus and Vernon Jordan’s law firm) but a liberal democrat! Nor was it an accident that Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman George Miller Jr. were ardent supporters. It was time to stand and be counted.

In 1964 (long ago as time is measured in Washington DC), LBJ had a vision: education would spontaneously break the shackles of poverty, racism and social isolation. A grand vision to be sure, but naïve in retrospect.

That is why NCLB will survive – change perhaps, be implemented unevenly, improve one hopes – because it was the right legislation at the right time. Knowing what we now know, and endowed with IMS software that makes schooling transparent, it is impossible to imagine a return to the bad old days when it was alright to leave some children behind.

Denis Doyle
5/11/2005

I once thought that acronyms – the upper case initials insiders use as a shorthand for long, tedious titles – were an American special. NCLB, DoE, DOD leap out at you. The plethora of government agencies and activities developed during the Great Depression by FDR’s blizzard of reconstruction activity was too much for overtaxed imaginations of the day. They were soon referred to as FDR’s alphabet-soup agencies – TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) were three enduring Depression examples, while the most enduring of his presidency was undoubtedly GI (Government Issue).

Acronyms have taken on a life of their own at all levels of government – state, local, federal, even international (UN and UNESCO are two examples my spell-checker dictionary recognizes.) And they are no stranger to the private sector, ranging from the highest level of brand recognition – IBM™, AIG™, AFT, NEA, AASA, AFL-CIO -- to the jargon of the high tech world: SIF compliant (software interoperability framework) to IT (information technology). Even titles are often acronyms today: CEO, CIO and less often, CAO.

Acronyms serve a useful purpose in a busy world – knowing them is a form of inside-baseball. First the arcane vocabulary identifies the user as a knowledgeable insider, faster and more efficient than a secret handshake.

Second, acronyms (if they are understood) speed up discourse, both verbal and print, by economizing on space and time. Try saying Office of Economic Opportunity five times and you no longer wonder why people downsized it to OEO. (Out of sight, out of mind, however – OEO disappeared more than a decade ago and knowing what OEO stands for surely dates one. Acronyms also lend themselves to sardonic humor: there were allegedly so many ex-nuns and priests at OEO that wags called it the Office of Ecclesiastical Outcasts. And my favorite was the droll joke that Lee Iacocca was not a real name, but an acronym that meant I Am Chairman of Chrysler Corporation of America).

Third, a good (effective and successful) acronym produces intellectual synergy and offers a novel and unified way to look at the world. Indeed, a good acronym is a modern neologism (new word). I ran into such an acronym at a recent meeting of EUN (European Schoolnet), an education network of networks created by the EU (European Union). ICT is the case in point (which I’ve just added to my spell-checker dictionary!)

It stands for Infrastructure, Content and Training, neatly knitting together the three key strands of what we inadequately call education IT in the states. Or, if you prefer, it is the three-legged stool that supports technology and education.

The linkage is powerfully important. None of the three legs stand on their own, yet in most environments (in both the private and public sectors) I (infrastructure), C (content) and T (training) sit in separate silos. And there are silos within silos. Infrastructure – software, hardware, and communication protocols – often fall under different departments. Think of E-rate, for example. Or the uses to which I is put – curriculum and instruction, assessment and the like are often off by themselves.

Content is fractured and fragmented as well.

And training is all over the map. One large district I know conducted a PD (profession development) audit last year and came up with $80 million in uncoordinated expenditures with neither common purposes nor common metrics.

ICT -- repeated not as a mantra, but observed as a philosophy -- has the potential to conceptually unify the field. In EU meetings, at least, when someone raises questions about I, someone else follows on with questions about C and T, a useful and thought provoking exercise. And beyond conceptual unification, ICT has the potential to unify practice by highlighting and honoring the right issues and the right relationships.

Denis P Doyle
5/9/2005

He who pays the piper calls the tune is an old and much quoted adage, but as I’ve been discovering, in some countries at least, it is assuming a new meaning. Once it was meant to describe a top-down, heavy-handed, control/command organization structure, epitomized by the modern factory or modern state (welfare state as well as totalitarian state). Sound familiar?

In the post-industrial era, however, it is clear that this organizational format no longer works. In the private sector, empowered workers are the order of the day, not because of dewy-eyed sentimentality, but because it increases output and encourages creativity. Old-fashioned capitalism at work.

I was in Brussels recently, at a meeting of European Schoolnet (or EUN) and sat in on a briefing by a representative of the Belgian (Flemish) Ministry of Education. (There are three parallel ministries in Belgium reflecting their linguistic divides: Flemish, French and German. Because my grandparents on my mother’s side came from the heart of Flemish Belgium, Antwerp, I was especially eager to learn more from the Flemish Ministry official. I was also interested because Flemish students score high on international mathematics comparisons.) And learn more I did.

First, 70% of Flemish-speaking students (about half of all the students in Belgium) attend publicly-funded parochial schools; 15% attend public schools organized by municipalities, and 15% attend “other” government schools. In this respect Flemish schools look very much like Dutch schools (except Dutch parochial schools are half Catholic and half Dutch-Reformed – the Flemish parochial schools are all Catholic).

What is most striking however is the extent to which individual schools enjoy almost complete pedagogical freedom. They are at liberty to teach as they like (one is tempted to say, as the spirit moves them), so long as they meet their assigned academic targets.

Far be it for me to feel (very) sorry for senior civil servants, but they (those in the Flemish Ministry, at least) suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Particularly when they are no longer in a command/control environment, they can do no more than observe and exhort. (Only as a last resort can the Ministry intervene). And one of the things the Ministry has observed is computer distribution. In most elementary schools computers are distributed by classroom, a practice the Ministry heartily endorses; in most high schools, computers are found in labs, a practice the Ministry disdains, but is powerless to do anything about except declaim.

In keeping with a philosophy of academic target setting in a context of maximum local control, the technology budget is decentralized to the building level. The various schools own their own computers and can do with them as they like. Leaving teachers and administrators free to make mistakes as well as claim victories.

(When I asked the Ministry representative why Flemish students did so well in international math comparisons the answer was instantaneous and simple – the curriculum. At least about that the Ministry and individual schools are in agreement.)

The Ministry, of course, even though it cannot order schools around by diktat has arrows in its quiver, most notably the power of evidence and the corollary power of persuasion. The evidence can be gathered, analyzed and reported at the Ministry level – in cooperation with local schools -- and then disseminated to them, giving them grist for their local decision-making mills. For my part, I’m eager to learn what Flemish high schools do with computers over the next year or so.)

To put things in philosophic perspective, permit me to close with something Nietzsche said in a slightly different context: the Flemish Ministry of Education has learned to “reconcile freedom and necessity.”

Denis P. Doyle
4/24/2005

When Jonathan Harber and I co-founded SchoolNet nearly eight years ago, we felt like bird watchers on the lookout for a rare species, an education CIO. We weren’t even sure what to look for: plumage, wing span, voice, silhouette? In 1998 there were no reliable sightings to go on. Restlessly searching across the country we found only one – self-declared -- not surprisingly, in a leading edge district in California.

Today the absence of a CIO is noteworthy (even if they are not much easier to spot). What accounts for this transformation? The same set of reasons that CIO’s are nearly ubiquitous in the private sector: information (data) is power. And it is specially powerful when it is abundant, reliable and instantaneously accessible. Indeed, it has always been thus, since the time of the temple scribes whose power – because they could count – was enormous. But the mechanics of data gathering, storage, and management have been transformed – exponentially -- from cuneiform tablets to tablet handhelds, from the wonders of the jungle telegraph to broadband in the home.

It is, of course, a commonplace to note that the IT revolution is transforming. But bigger than creating IT departments in schools are the changes in organization and behavior that follow the appointment of a CIO. Just as the farmer does more that simply retire his faithful mule and put his trusty tractor in the barn – he now needs to understand and practice mechanics not animal husbandry -- the school district retires the green eye-shade accountant and his three-legged stool and replaces him with a bank of air-conditioned servers – requiring at minimum DBA’s to help the electronically challenged (which is to say 90% of the staff).

In this setting the CIO has many responsibilities, most obviously for hardware, software and broadband selection, acquisition and maintenance – a major job in itself -- less obviously but no less important is interfacing with the substantive parts of the organization. That is where the rubber meets the road, because truth be told IT is just a tool – powerful and fancy to be sure – but still a tool, to be used in service to other objectives. The CIO who forgets this simple truism invites not just problems, but disaster. The CIO must know in her bones that IT must justify itself by the academic fruit it bears, by the convenience it affords and the productivity it enhances.

Thus, the CIO’s real measure of IT is not the size or scope of district LAN’s or WAN’s or PAN’s (personal area networks e.g., Bluetooth), pipeline size or gigahertz of memory but improved instruction and increased academic outcomes.

Not surprisingly, then, the CIO’s job description is a tricky one to write: it is a work in progress. The CIO must have a deep and broad technical background (though not necessarily be an engineer); the CIO must know a good deal about curriculum and instruction (or be a very insightful and a very quick study); the CIO must be a student of organizational culture as well. And she must have the skills of a diplomat, the patience of a Saint and nerves of steel. Indeed, the CIO is the embodiment of the tension between art and science, or, if you will, right and left brain.

Among other things, on the negative side of the ledger, the CIO must protect the Superintendent and Board from making mistakes – investing in the wrong hardware and software can be costly to say the least. Just as costly in terms or morale is IT that is neither user friendly nor user useful. The press loves stories about IT disasters and rare is the Superintendent or Board that is qualified to pass judgment on such arcane but important matters. Great faith and confidence must repose in the CIO.

On the positive side of the ledger, the CIO is emblematic as well as real, representing a fresh vision of what schooling can become in the future. Such a person -- new to the traditional school hierarchy -- can help chart a new course. Happily, when the tension inherent in IT applications is successfully resolved not only does the CIO fly high and straight but the larger school community does as well.

Perhaps surprisingly for a high tech firm, the SchoolNet corporate manta is the technology is easy, the culture is hard! By this we mean that the technology is straightforward, the organization of schooling is complex and – by high tech standards – often ossified.

If this is true which part of the culture is most in need of change? Time organization? Instruction? Blind adherence to an agricultural calendar and an industrial clock? Printed textbooks (as the principal means of delivering curriculum)? The lecture -- with the teacher at the head of the class talking to 30 bored and bewildered students? Age grouping of elementary students? Compulsory attendance?

The list could go on, but the answer would be the same: all of the above. They are strands woven into a single tapestry called the modern school. Each must be changed to change the whole. Is there one key to change all of them? A fundamental shift in attitude. To use the jargon of the trade, school improvement should be systemic. Or school improvement should be holistic. But as any experienced manager knows you can’t change everything at once; you have to start somewhere. As it is, changing any one thing ends up changing everything; because you have to start somewhere, the trick is to find the point of least resistance and maximum leverage.

(This problem might be thought of as Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem The Incredible One Horse Shay in reverse. In the poem he describes a buggy so artfully designed that no one piece wears out before anything else – which is to say, everything wears out at exactly the same time. Surprise!)

If everything must be changed, but not all of it can be done at once, where should we begin? My recommendation is to begin to think like an economist. (That’s right, the dismal science!) A few preliminaries are all that’s needed. First, the economist worries about the allocation of necessarily scarce resources. By this the economist means that our desires (demand) will always outstrip supply. Always. No matter how rich or how poor.

How do you allocate resources? If you’re Thracymacus (from Plato’s Republic) you believe in the right of the stronger. If you’re a democrat (with a small “d”) you believe in the sovereignty of the people. If you’re an economist you believe in the highest and best use of resources. In plain English, you believe in the biggest bang for the buck. A bit more subtly, you believe in the most productive use of resources, or, better yet, getting more out of available resources. In a phrase, thinking smarter.

The term of art of economists is ROI, return on investment. What do you get for what you spend? What is the “return” on expenditure? This is important because most resources are fungible. The dollars for an art teacher (much to her consternation, perhaps) can be spent on a music or algebra or science