Public Schools and (Lack Of) Innovation

On a bit of a personal note, I just realized how long it's been between blog posts. Over two months! Wow!

I didn't die. I managed to avoid death; instead I have been recovering from a couple of broken bones. As I told a coworker at one point, I definitely do not have a superhuman ability to stop cars with my body.

That's a quick few lines explaining my lack of recent updates; obviously it has little to do with the title of this post. But on to the point. Well, sort of. This is tagged as a <rant>, not a well structured essay. If stream-of-thought writing isn't your thing, this is another post to avoid.

I've worked for several years in the public school system in the past.  It was my first "real" job outside of working in a small ISP/computer repair business and served as what would become my introduction to the real world of politics in small town schools. (I should note that my direct experiences are in relatively rural PA schools; laws vary in other states dictating the specifics of how schools are run. Also these are my own experiences. I have family that have been involved in the local schools for combined decades of experience...this particular case reflects things that happened to or around me during my time in those trenches.)

I remember becoming very frustrated with leadership in schools. I worked in the IT department in  system where hundreds of people were working in a hierarchy charged with taking in ignorant kids and creating educated citizens at the other end of a pipeline. You had a (relatively) large number of kids being led by a group of teachers who were in turn led by principals who were then led by a superintendent, and auxiliary services such as maintenance and supplies have another branch of leadership.

It's a format that should be a natural case study in leadership 101. The goals are clearly laid out. Superficially, results should be simple to measure (are the kids graduating because they meet actual goals or because they've been in the system a particular number of years?), and outcomes trackable. Information and status can be sent up the line, and directives and initiatives are passed from the superintendent and principals back down the line, leading to more measuring of outcomes and evaluating the level of success.

Schools even reflect (and reinforce) this idea. You have a chain of command where grievances are filed and issues heard. There are numerous meetings among departments and grade levels that interact with the management level leaders. Standardized testing is now, more than ever, ingrained into the public school culture.

But I came to realize that the schools didn't really do anything in terms of innovating the culture of learning. Classrooms are largely structured the same as they had been for decades; allowing for changes in fashion and substitute high-speed printers in place of mimeograph machines, the classroom setting is more or less recognizable to today's students. School learning paradigms have become nearly universal blocks of pre-packaged tripe...the school structure itself hasn't changed (teachers are lecturing at the front of the class, bells signal shuffling to or changing of the next subject, etc.).

Indeed it seems the only things that have substantially changed is the terminology encapsulating the latest magic solution to education problems (No Child Left Behind! Mainstreaming! Outcomes Based Education!) and expectations laid at the feet of educators by the public (it's hard not to find evidence that schools are regarded as free babysitting for an increasingly strained middle- to low-class worker in the community...)

Why is that? I was largely blind to the reality that schools themselves are not so much looked to as innovators as much as they are maintainers of status quo; opportunities for innovation weren't just ignored, but actively discouraged.

Teachers with a well of knowledge built over years of practical experience could probably do some interesting curriculum work in their subject area. Today the means of creating a kind of custom curriculum...tests, handouts, worksheets, books for a given subject area...is completely within the reach of even the most modestly equipped classroom. What I've seen is teachers encroaching on that idea being discouraged if they deviate from the expected curriculum supplied to them.

Rather than being empowered to teach using experience and new methods, then evaluated on outcomes, teachers are beholden to parents, regardless of what qualifications the parent has in judging any aspect of the classroom experience. Teaching is now a minefield in potential disasters, and the leadership in no way leads with authority when a parent is in some way offended. Soft subjects such as English are an especially ripe subject for criticism when parents aren't bright enough to understand parody, double entendre or sarcasm, the use of which was a staple for writers such as William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift.

The baseline ignorance only seems beneficial when the community is too dim to fully grasp the bawdy humor of Shakespeare...unfortunately the moment a student's learning leads to piercing the veil of ignorance, should they share with their parents the discovery that a nunnery is not in fact for housing nuns in the presumed context, the teacher is once again found to be hovering a foot over a landmine.

The true leader is someone who has faith that his or her staff are capable of doing their jobs. They guide and nurture when necessary, and allow freedom to fail. Problems are issues to be rectified, not cancers to be cut out from the organization, unless all other methods to correct issues have failed. And leaders...good managers...shield the people in their charge from shit raining down from above. They pass goals and edicts that are necessary for their people to do their jobs while "up-managing," with authority, when people outside their silo try to swipe at their people. They do this because the organization is good and wants what is best for the common good.

It was only after being in the environment for over a decade that I understood you don't see innovation in public schools because they do not have true leadership; they instead are an agency that act as a government entity, only separate enough to not be directly governed by or have accountability to higher governance, but still beholden to actual state- and federal- rules. It's a strange hybrid that evolved from the original model for public education: the factory.

Today's schools are ostensibly self contained entities with day to day operations ruled by the principals in each building and business for the district answering to the superintendent. Teachers are constantly monitored by administrators, many of whom have classroom experience from the distant past but still weigh in on minutiae of classroom experience by sitting in on short periods of instruction and extrapolating from these sessions what an entire class is like, even if they have little to no certification in that subject matter.

Above the administrators is a school board, a group of community members elected by a small percent of the community to conduct school business and make sure administrators are acting in the best interest of the learning community.

Beyond this group is the state and federal education departments; they supply funding and issue mandates for recognition of state accreditation. These groups don't normally directly interact with schools, leading to reinforce the idea that schools are a quasi-government agency. Their influence is not unfelt, however; if schools want a large percentage of their funding, they have to follow certain rules dictated by the government. For example, schools don't filter Internet traffic because it's beneficial for protecting students; it's required if they want funding for Internet access and/or equipment, despite the overhead added in the burden on staff since students are constantly trying to find new proxy sites or bypass filters using their cellphones as access points and as of the time I left the school system the funding mandating filters on student access was not to be used to filter student access. The funding mandates (also called unfunded mandates within the school system) had stipulations often unrelated to what they mandated; it's like requiring a kid to eat all their peas at dinner if they are to be allowed to watch a favorite program on TV.

Schools themselves end up operating as a kind of system maintaining the status quo; the state hands them mandates, sometimes in the form of laws, sometimes in the forms of conditions that withhold the school's allowance if they don't comply. Parents bully teachers into creating safe spaces that conform to their own form of "safe space," creating a lowest-common-denominator education bar (heaven help you if you promote witchcraft by expressing an interest in Harry Potter! And a sex reference in a book? Never allowed...by the way, Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why exposes kids to the idea of suicide, and we'd never want to have kids thinking about that, so we should ban that as well!)

The people I thought were leaders in the school organization instead buffer themselves from the responsibility of leading by complying with the vocal minority of the community. Teachers must navigate the minefields of teaching with little to no support from principals because they tend to act more in the interest of avoiding complaints than creating an environment of academic freedom. Often this is justified as conforming to "community standards" and enforced by the school board, although in my experience the school board often pays attention more to personal issues than school issues as a whole (one funny example was when the board okayed a teacher's request to pay for training on a particular skillset and at the same meeting vote to eliminate the class where that skill would have been used by that teacher.) This generally leads to a system where complaints are addressed, but positive reinforcement is rare.

What is the positive reinforcement? The general attitude I see today is "you have a job." Administrators don't rock the boat, and the teachers, most vulnerable to landmines because they have to please the administrators above them without angering the parents of dozens of students, are under constant stress to "perform" without challenging students (well, parents by proxy...) ideology; often this is an impossible task. For example, the Bible is, technically speaking, a book of myths in terms of literature. But if you discuss this in a public school using actual academic terminology, you can bet your ass the parents will scream. They're typically okay if you apply the same terminology to a Quran and you have no Muslims in the community, though, even though it's the same idea.

Administrators fixate on enforcing mandates; the highest levels of school management are actually middle management. The community, often without understanding the system, are direct policy if it's not covered by state mandates (and who better to judge education than wealthy male politicians with no education experience?) This is a recipe for a quagmire.

Schools can't act on their own or take an initiative for innovation. This is why schools turn to other schools for "best practices"; to do something on their own means they take responsibility for their actions. Everything must be presented as "how they do things at $NEIGHBORING_SCHOOL_DISTRICT;" that way if it fails, it's because of something the teachers did wrong when implementing the directive. Administrators avoid anything that would displease the school board for fear of being fired, and when the school board and community are most concerned with "results" and "tax money", that means spending large amounts of time making sure blame is pushed down on the teachers for not following directives properly (vague directives with specific goals are their friends in these cases.)

This structure also leads to the large sums of money spent on consultants and presenters. I was amazed at the amount of cash doled out to people brought in over in-service days to tell teachers how to teach the latest fad; while I wasn't in the system as long as some people I knew, I was in it long enough to see a couple of "education shifts" (the changing of fads were rarely acknowledged when they failed. They simply slid away as they were overshadowed by the Next Big Thing.) Some administrators...usually with a title vaguely tied to curriculum management...would hear about a new trend at a conference and justify their usefulness by lining up speakers to impart wisdom to the teachers (because they spent years in college learning how not to teach, I suppose.)

I suppose there's irony in that if the curriculum person didn't do this, they'd be considered not doing their jobs.

Create an environment where the leadership spends a good chunk of time catering to vague standards perceived to be community preferences (often driven less by educational goals and more by personal agenda) with a heaping helping of blame-shifting, strain out accountability at the administrative level, and you get a climate that breeds management by personal vendettas.

In most small businesses and startups it's said that the founders set the personality of the business. Apple is famous for the Steve Jobs "founder DNA" after the departure of the Woz and the rise of coverage regarding diversity issues have given subtle hints of the leadership style of several tech companies. But leadership in public schools are rarely remembered by people aside from their staff, and it's rarely a scale of how "good" someone is. More often than not it's a scale of how incompetent they were in managing his or her staff.

The scale of success is often weighed against the perceived damage they'd done (or avoided). Previous superintendents and principals are rarely recalled fondly except in the context of why the current leadership is inadequate in properly handling issues. It's hard to tell the number of times I've heard some variation of, "This would never have happened if $NAME were still here..."

But that's only in handling personnel issues. In terms of lasting legacy, there are two ways for a person in some position of power to assert him or herself; changes in staffing, and major projects. The staffing changes are mostly internal recognition. Usually this is where realization of nepotism takes place; often candidates interviewing for positions then getting job offers just happen to have graduated from that school district. This tends to be relatively benign...at least they can justify this as cultivating from within the community, and students who become staff are essentially the school reaping what it sows.

On the other hand there are people who come into positions from farther outside the district and start hiring relatives or candidates who are entirely outside the community. Not in terms of a diverse hiring pattern from all around the state, but rather constantly importing from the previous employer, like situations in which an angry ex-employee from one company gets hired at a competitor and the first thing they do is start soliciting their division to follow suit. Not only is this transparent to existing employees but calls into question if the new coworkers are there because they are qualified or because they had a keyword in the resume.

The second method of legacy is construction projects. These are most visible to the community and take careful mastery in politics to pass, as large scale renovation or addition of a facility is an obvious show of spending taxpayer money, which is an obvious trigger for the school board to reflexively hate the administrator in question.

What these both have in common: politics. Since the leadership isn't actually leading with ideas for improving the state of education or education initiatives, the political landscape become internal competitions, a teacher's Hunger Games of avoiding ill-attention from principals lest you become a target for culling.

Looking back I think I came to feel that the education environment, while broken in many ways as a property of the system, was made toxic by those in leadership roles. When the superintendent was decent...not just at doing the job, but a decent human being with decent goals that bordered on being overly idealistic at times, given the limitations imposed by the system...the stressors would come more often than not by the willingness of administrators to automatically bend to the arbitrary will of parents or from the school board (not coincidentally around the time new contracts were due, as that was the time when the school board would make it abundantly clear that they do not value educators in their community.) But when new leaders move into position with their own vendettas, sagging morale would move from bending to nearly breaking. Teachers are put into a position of having to navigate the ideology minefield of student (parent) expectations AND having to avoid giving administrators a target on which to push them out of a job and replace them with less experienced (and thus easier to manipulate and give lower pay) hires of their own preferences, and in some cases preferential hiring would start a legacy of staff with obligational loyalty.

I thought at first this type of behavior was anomalous until a friend in another state related a similar story of this happening to his sister when she worked in public education; her experience made her quit the profession altogether.

What does this have to do with innovation (or lack thereof) in public schools? There's no incentive to innovate. The rewards for management comes from exerting limited power over their spheres of influence (hiring/firing people in exchange for proper loyalties, for example) or pushing for projects of limited usefulness (Another experienced example: grants for a computer lab grab a local headline and benefits schools for about 2 years, after which the equipment tends to fail due to lack of maintenance funding.) Changes are slow, and only implemented if there are volumes of justification from neighboring school districts doing something similar and if blame for failure can be easily shifted to underlings. Even if teachers have an idea for an improvement, they risk putting a target on their backs (you can't shift blame any lower than teacher on the hierarchy) and they typically have an overloaded schedule as it is from understaffing.

I guess the most embarrassing part is the amount of time it took to realize that the public school system almost purposely lacks incentive to innovate. Instead it has become an environment that incentivizes a CYA principle (Cover Your Ass), where the best course of action is to keep your head down and stay off the radar of others. I've rarely witnessed administrators reward, but appearing when there were problems became so commonplace that it became a common meme; if a teacher saw an administrator, it was because there was a problem. What started as a factory model for efficiently taking children and indoctrinating them into citizens benefiting society is a quagmire of looking out for oneself, with little to no sense of true camaraderie at any level.

The saddest part is that because this is a system, change will be very, very slow. Attempts to create an innovative system...think charter schools or alternative schools...are usually blocked, because new schools must jump hurdles for accreditation but also drain funding from public schools in the district where the new school is proposed, so they get to have a say in whether the charter school is opened. If the fact that schools depicted in older movies are so very familiar to today's audiences, this probably isn't a sign that change will be welcome anytime soon.