SabuSense

It’s not surprising at a time when the idea of individual players getting high salaries isn’t questioned that the Washington Redskins Albert Haynesworth might forget that football is a team sport.

Unfortunately, ignoring that fundamental truth is not an option for Mike Shanahan, the teams’ coach — who is held individually accountable for the results that only a team can achieve.   That universal principle applies whether the leader is called a coach, CEO or school system superintendent.

Unfortunately Michelle Rhee never learned it — and judging by the cover article of the current Newsweek — apparently still hasn’t.   Instead, in DC “her team” was the enemy. It’s “players” she saw as self-serving bureaucrats and union leaders – who then served as the focal points for continual “battles” that first had to be “won” before all students could be “put first.”

Unfortunately for those children, she never understood that (like Shanahan) she was the only one accountable for integrating all the players in ways that would create a sustained capacity for “winning” – i.e., meeting the needs of each child every day.

And now according to her words on Newsweek’s cover — “I’m not done fighting” — The real battle for school reform begins now” — she’s taking this game plan national with a new political organization –  “StudentsFirst.

But how many of her well-intentioned supporters will understand

(1) that at the end of that game, the losers will once more be those same students they hoped some Superman would make “first.”  And

(2) that there is a better putting-students-first game plan that actually works.

The evidence is right “next door” in the larger and more complex Montgomery County Public Schools which this month received national recognition for “winning” its putting–students-learning–first game when it received a Broad Foundation’s Prize in Urban Education and the federal government’s Baldrige Award for Performance Excellence.

Significantly, both objective observers acknowledged that in Montgomery County the kids were winning because of a “team” effort.

A team with a game plan that effectively integrated the work of a school board with its diverse interests, three unions (not one), and a bureaucracy of former teachers and principals so that on the playing field of daily schooling they together had ways to make decisions that actually kept students first.

Data-Based Management (DBM) is an increasingly popular concept across all work sectors because it seems to capture the idea that decisions should be based less on assumptions and more on actual indicators related to the situation at hand. That makes a lot of sense.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the data make sense. Or that the more data we have, the better chance we’ll understand the problem the data suggests we have.  That’s because aggregating data doesn’t indicate their relationship to each other as our minds connect them into information, then knowledge… and with experience, wisdom. It’s these interrelationships that contribute most to the sense-making necessary for understanding why a problem exists, what might be done about addressing it at that core level, and then how and where to start.

The seriousness of this missing dimension of DBM was suggested in the last posting ==  Making Sense of “Nonsense” — where we questioned the belief that Montgomery County MD Schools successful systemic improvements and results are not applicable to the situations confronting urban districts because of differences in their demographic data, such as the community’s economic and ethnic characteristics, or its access to fiscal resources.  And we raised two “What if…?” questions.

(1) What if the problems causing the bleeding in urban districts are more deeply embedded in all school systems?  And

(2) What if the “blinders” created by a focus only on urban school systems keep them (and those who try to help them) from seeing effective “how-to’s” that can directly and effectively address the priority conditions in reformers “urban musts” lists?

Consider this “data:”

•            If the root of the problem lay in just children’s economic, social  and ethnic characteristics then MCPS couldn’t have been so successful in developing the learning capacities of the same cohort of children as found in “urban” districts.

•            If it were just about “adequate funding,” then 30 years of “throwing money at problems” by major foundation and government programs surely would have made a difference by now.

•            If the problem were simply an “urban” one, then the national math and science test results from all schools that have alarmed the science and business communities would not be demanding all the attention they are getting from those concerned about America’s future.

Making sense of the sameness

To understand the significance of the knowledge being generated in MCPS requires first looking at different “data” about the core of  work of a school system.  Data about the ways they are the same as other worksettings, not different.   And this is largely information about the nature of the functional “relationships” among the systems “parts” that interconnect it into a sustainable “whole.”

–        Governance relationships,

–        Accountability relationships,

–        Problem-solving relationships,

–        Labor-Management relationships,

–        Community-engagement  relationships,

–        and, most of all at its core, the interactive relationship of the “worker” and the “work.”

When this “data” is brought together in a coherent way, new knowledge is created and it’s possible to see that school “systems” have been operating from a common, but unarticulated, systems model that frames and supports that web of these invisible but entangling relationships.  It is their unstated “theory-of-action,” and it forms the old “box” that reformers keep trying fruitlessly to break out of.

The difference of the MCPS story is at the level of this “box.”  The alternative way-of-thinking about a work system this site employs makes it possible to make sense of how MCPS has “managed” their data in order to transform it into the information and knowledge required for its work from the classroom to the boardroom.  And, if that makes sense, to then explore its implications for other districts – especially urban communities where the need is greatest.

That story of Data-Based Management is an essential component of this sense-making website and serves as a reality check on my tendency in blog postings to communicate at a too-theoretical, abstract, “head-hurting” level.

So don’t hesitate to ask for my “data”…

Once again I find unique “value” in the Answer Sheet — the Washington Post’s education blog shepherded by Valerie Strauss. But it’s not in its “answers” … but instead its the “questions” it forces me to raise.

As an example, its October 9 posting – “The bankrupt ‘school reform manifesto’ of Rhee, Klein, etc.” correctly (I believe) identified some of the apparent “nonsense” at the core of recent national attempts to focus public attention on the urgent need to “fix urban public schools” – in particular:

• the “How to fix our schools” Manifesto issued by 15 “urban” school system leaders who acknowledge being “responsible for educating nearly 2 1/2 million students in America,”

• the “Waiting for Superman” film,

• the “Superwoman” focus on the seemingly-appropriate and acceptable actions of one temporary leader — Michelle Rhee, and

• the federal “Race-to-the-Top” initiative.

But as I read Strauss’ posting about the “wrongness” seemingly-communicated by the Manifesto, Superman, and the Race-to-the-Top…  I found critical differences in our conclusions about what to do to make them “right” … and I began to wonder why?

My guess was that it had to do with the nature of the experiences that shaped what we each believed about what we currently see happening today in schools.

I know my own suspicions about the validity and usefulness of the Manifesto were raised when I saw who its authors were, and then, because of my beliefs about “the actual problem” they are fruitlessly trying to deal with (which I’ll get to below), I found their reliance on what appears to be “intellectual dishonesty and scapegoating” actually illustrating the ironic paradox underlying the first two words embedded in the Manifesto’s title: “HOW TO fix our schools.”

We’re living in a time of unlimited access to information, yet most of our leaders really don’t know what to do…and more critical is that many of them don’t know they don’t know.

The Manifesto’s “Must” list (below) illustrates the consequences created by this paradox. To emphasize the urgency required by the problems “urban” schools must deal with, they converted the goals that “should” be achieved (if the problem is to be effectively solved) into “musts” and “have-to’s.” But something’s missing: the answer to Deming’s question to everyone who proposed noble goals – “By What Method?” And in their case, this requires knowing ways to do them all — a systemic “given” for a system leader/CEO/Superintendent. And, sadly, the success records of many of its leader/authors suggest they have yet to figure out how to do that.

How can that be? How can so many people who are paid to be “right’ continually be so “wrong?” How can it be that this group of the “best and the brightest” urban school leaders don’t know how to fulfill their role’s primary systemic requirement?

And more important, because of the urgency of the problems they must deal with, apparently do not know there already are working models for how-to-do-it-systemically–in-education that might meet their present needs.

Here’s their “Musts” and “Have-to’s list:”

• (“As educators, superintendents, chief executives and chancellors” ..the task of reforming the country’s public schools begins with us.”)  … and we must be accountable for how our schools perform.

• … must start “with the basics…. the quality of the teacher.”

• … must first shed some of the entrenched practices that have held back our education system, practices that have long favored adults, not children. These practices are wrong, and they have to end now.

• … have to change the rules to professionalize teaching

• … must equip educators with the best technology available to make instruction more effective and efficient. By better using technology to collect data on student learning and shape individualized instruction, we can help transform our classrooms and lessen the burden on teachers’ time.

• … must also eliminate arcane rules such as “seat time,”

• … must give teachers and schools the capability and flexibility to meet the needs of students

•  … also must make charter schools a truly viable option

My reading of this list of the Manifesto’s “methodless” systemic answers left me with 3 related questions:

(1) why does there appear to be so much seeming “nonsense” from those who “should know” from their experiences what’s right for the kids whose capacities for 21^st century success they are responsible for developing?

(2) why can’t they think the “unthinkable?” – Get outside the “box” created by the nature and urgency of the “problem” they’ve been asked to solve and discover the “right now” answers available there?  And what is it that enables others dealing with similar conditions to apparently do it?  Then,

(3) What were they thinking?  And here is where their “nonsense” began to make sense to me.  The underlying issue here is not “what,” but how they were thinking, and why.

I’m going to suggest an answer to all three that at first may seem illogical and more “nonsense.”  That’s because it seems like common sense to think of the “problem” our society as a whole is trying to solve as an “urban” one. With scarce resources and time, we believe that’s where we must first “fix” the education “system.” It’s the practical, common sense approach called Triaging – “first stop the bleeding.”

But…

(1) what if the problems causing the bleeding are more deeply embedded in all school systems?  And

(2) what if the “blinders” created by a focus only on urban school systems keep them (and those who hire or try to help them) from seeing effective “how-to’s” that can directly and effectively address the conditions in their “urban musts” list?

**********

So, returning to my original thought that what Valerie and I were each taking away from the Manifesto might be influenced by our belief-shaping experiences, here’s where the nature of my experience (as a foundation-, government-, and professional association-supported “change agent” with school systems of all sizes and nature from rural up though state education agencies) created a different systemic perspective that suggests positive answers to those two “What if…?” questions.

Interestingly, my understanding of the common systemic nature of the work of schooling that urban districts share with all others began locally with the D.C. Public Schools. This initial experience came in 1968 as a national Ford Foundation project I directed (that had engaged me with urban superintendents from Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Rochester NY, the New Jersey State superintendent and a Washington DC Board member) was winding down.  I was asked to serve as the Chair of the Working Party on Instructional Materials for the Executive Study Group for a Model Urban School System for the District of Columbia. Our purpose was to give further study, and recommend actions to implement the recommendations contained in the “Passow Report” – Columbia University’s comprehensive 1967 study of the D.C. Public Schools.

In subsequent years, as the DC system became more and more dysfunctional — regardless of internal and external attempts to “fix” it — I continued to interact in a variety of roles with Board members, teachers, central administrators, and principals. And my most important take-away product of that personal interaction was a realization that my perceptions of the individuals I experienced didn’t seem to match the ways the public perceived them. They were people with “will,” but without “way.” They wanted to make a difference for kids …but the schools had no sustainable ways to tap it. So, when the public saw them not doing what’s best for kids they concluded that they didn’t want to, when the truth was that they couldn’t.

I’ll fast-forward now to the present through a time span of learning experiences that included my work as Associate Executive Director of the “other” national organization that represents the needs of public school systems’ leaders – the AASA, (which brought me into direct interaction with the leadership needs of all size school systems), and finally to the past 12 years when I have been an embedded observer of the ways the Montgomery County MD Public Schools seems to have been addressing the common systemic needs all school districts must address. (And just received one of the Broad Foundation’s 2010 awards for doing it.)

This decades-separated time span is relevant because it frames the state of my present understanding. From one experience — in “urban” DC — I took away a theory that made sense about the systemic scope and nature of a school district. From the other — in “suburban” Montgomery County – I’ve been taking away practical insights about how that “theory” translates into systemic practice regardless of a community’s demographics. For 12 years I’ve been using theory to  “catch them doing something right” in practice, and as a by-product, discovering another, “missing,” level of theory emerging from it.

It related back to the “will” with no “way” earlier observation. Here was a school system developing “ways” to work systemically by effectively engaging the “will” of all of its employees and stakeholders – specifically, their personal need to make a difference for kids whose lives they touch today.  What’s the evidence? In a recent letter to the editor, a (usually despised) “union” leader and moreover, one who represents employees who in many districts aren’t considered “educators” – service employees — noted how

….“every adult who interacts with a student in any way understands he or she has an opportunity to make a difference for that student, be it as a role model, a shoulder to lean on, an example of pride in good work, or simply a smiling face… our relationship (with the system) has always been based on what’s right for the kids, and we’ve always known our ties are only as strong as our commitment to a system that produces exceptional results.”

******

“But enough about me”… responses to Answer Sheet’s postings often capture the frustrations of those who feel that everything-seems-connected-to-everything-else, but don’t have ways to make sense of the disconnected “nonsense.” Can the perspective that frames the knowledge on this site make it easier to deal with it?

I believe it can…not just for the Manifesto, but also for “Waiting for Superman,” which unfortunately leaves the impression that there are singular causes (unions and bureaucracies) and singular solutions (charter schools and individual teachers who “really” care) to the “urban” schooling problems…  and about Michelle Rhee, whose fate was determined from the start, not by the good things she “knew” about “teachers,” but by the essential things she “didn’t know” about the district’s accountability for the connected “teaching process” that’s required for them to successfully perform their necessary role every day… and who unfortunately “didn’t know she didn’t know it”… and, judging by her departing comments, most likely still doesn’t.

At the same time, I also know how this way-of-thinking can be a frustration-adder because its hard to suggest better answers to questions that aren’t being asked … and recognizing why.  I sometimes try to relieve it through venting in blogs like Answer Sheet. But most of it has been poured into this new web/blog site — www.sabusense.com — a work-in-progress developed with help from two national organizations committed to “re-thinking.” It’s for those trying to make sense of the disconnected “nonsense” swirling around schooling today who are seeking to “get out of the box” that limits their thinking and “connect the dots” in ways that make better sense.

The previous posting focused on the thinking crisis that continues to paralyze America’s school reforms and offers a good example of why. “The School Reform Game” cites Robert J. Samuelson’s 9/6/10 Newsweek article, “Why School ‘Reform’ Fails: Student motivation is the problem” as an example of the nature of the thinking problem, why we don’t think about it, and what can be done to re-think it.

Samuelson’s article presents an accurate picture of the playing field on which the ”school reform” game is being played. He correctly identifies all the players involved  – adults and children… noting that it’s a game no one is winning… and then concludes that once more no one will.

But the hole in his analysis is his assumption that we know what “game” is being played. That’s where the posting draws on actual school system practice this site has been documenting to suggest what happens when everybody in a school system understands the purpose of the game their team is playing, and works from the same game plan.

I’ll continue to use this sense-making platform to address in more detail some of the “nonsense” about “Superman,” “superwoman” – Michelle Rhee, and the Race-to-the-Top.

•            For example, one upcoming posting has a working title: “22,026 Supermen…No Waiting!” It’s probes the Superman metaphor as a way for describing the “hope” that for decades has driven reformers (and practitioners) in a fruitless search for someone or something with “enough power to save us” so we can make the differences in kids lives that we want to make. (Sarason once called this belief:  “Someday there will be enough…”)

But before trying to find the Superman (or Wonder Woman) we’re waiting for — someone with the power to do what “ordinary” people here on earth apparently can’t — it reminds us what we already know about the original “Superman.” He was only “super” on Earth. Back on his home planet – Krypton – everyone had his power to make a difference.

Based on that principle, it points to MCPS’ experience helping 22,026 individuals develop a way-of-thinking that releases their power to make a difference everyday, and suggests that what the films producer says he actually was looking for when he started to make the documentary can exist outside the limited universe of charter schools that people believe first have to be freed from “restraining control” of bureaucracies and unions.

What was the filmmaker looking for?  In interviews and articles he’s claimed he started out looking for places where “each child gets a good teacher; … the school is safe; and the principal has high expectations for every kid.” And soon found that he was looking for schools with processes that apparently put children first. Processes that kept teachers “bright and focused.” That created “relationships between a child and teacher” and which left “kids walking to class with a sense of purpose and an excitement for learning.” And underlying it all he was looking for places that recognized that even if they didn’t know exactly how to do it, they knew they had to impact all children, not just some, and had to start now.

The posting will then focus his original lens on MCPS as a way of understanding the nature of what a school district can do to develop for all what a Charter School can only offer to some. And especially the critical roles the “unions” and the “bureaucracy” play in it.

•            A second posting in the works – “If you don’t know what you Need… then any superintendent can get you there!” addresses the immediate need faced by both the Montgomery County and Washington DC schools to find new a new leader who can sustain and move beyond what’s already been achieved.

To illustrate the nature of the knowledge their Boards need in order to establish appropriate criteria, it notices DC’s tradition of “Throwing out the Babies with the Bathtub.” This recurring event seems caused by the lack of systemic awareness that every time they throw out a superintendent (six of the “best and brightest” in the last decade,) they also throw out the “bathtub” in which DC’s children are immersed every day — the structure of supportive processes and practices that keep people throughout the system “afloat.”

It will raise questions about the school district as “Bathtub” – the necessary container that is created with a single purpose (develop the learning capacities of all kids),…

— and which must hold everybody (the children and adults) and everything (what they do alone and together in learning and teaching) needed to achieve that purpose…

— and within which trust is the “water” they float in – the medium that makes it possible to create and sustain supportive relationships required to achieve their individual and collective purposes.

•            A third posting under development – “Racing to the Top without a Race Car” — addresses the current “nonsense”-producing aspects of the “Race-to-the-Top” initiative’s communications. And how, in the end, the school system or district is the only interconnected “vehicle” that can “win” the race.

That’s because as a national strategy, it’s intended to impact the quality of learning and teaching in ALL classrooms and its only that strategic scope that gives sense-making meaning to it’s seemingly-separate tactics. Unfortunately, Obama and Duncan are contributing to the “nonsense” by failing to communicate that connection. That may be why the words seem to have different meanings for them than for their critics … and when it comes to making sense of the effort, that difference makes all the difference.

For example, from that strategic perspective, I like their approach.  it makes sense to start with “states” because their policies and practices create the “structures” and “processes” that in the end must support the development of the learning capacities of EACH child regardless of what classroom, in what school, in what district they are in.

That makes the fundamental unit of “turnaround” not the “school”… but the school “system” … the “Bathtub” in which can be embedded the sustained capacity to develop EACH child’s learning capacity. A capacity, as we can now see in MCPS, is represented by a functional collaboration of adults who share responsibility for that development, and who have the information and support to fulfill their personal accountabilities in doing it. But it is the district that’s accountable for those “teaching” processes.

And it makes sense right now to add “charter schools” to their mix because unfortunately that’s the only seemingly-manageable unit today where people can “see” results in terms of the positive actions of actual kids and teachers. There have been few “district” models that can support that kind of emotional understanding evoked by “Waiting for Superman.”

•••••••

I’ll conclude with my initial thought about Answer Sheet’s value for me as a “nonsense-destroying” question generator. And especially when it leads to fundamental questions for which there are answers… but which are questions not being asked.

A fundamental premise of this Sabusense website is that underlying all the seeming nonsense today there is, as Sherlock Holmes might say, a “dog not barking.” When he faced a dilemma like education’s where none of the answers to what seemed to be the problem made sense, he pointed to something there all along that wasn’t being noticed — a “dog” that didn’t bark.” An “X-factor,” or as lawyers say, “facts not in evidence.” And he asked, “Why?” Why couldn’t it be heard or seen?

The nature of that “X-factor” can be found embedded under several of the “buttons” on this site’s home page as well as in several prior postings. It’s the one that Peter Senge identified when he observed:

“Many confronting the deeper nature of our problems cry out that the solution lies in “fixing education.” But you cannot “fix” a structure that was never designed for learning in the first place.”

Is Senge’s observation more “nonsense,” or does it have implications for the current, disconnected efforts at national reform that may once again only produce incremental, non-sustainable change in the fundamental ways that schools make a difference for all children?

And on the ground of “right now” local practice, how might it explain the Montgomery County schools success developing what seem to outside observers to be effective systemic “answers” by creating processes that enable the right people to be asking the “right questions” at the right time, and then providing the support to discover and develop “answers” that work for them?

I’d welcome anyone interested in exploring the seeming incongruity of this up-to-now missing piece in the sense-making jigsaw puzzle to join me here.

“Reforms” have disappointed for two reasons. First, no one has yet discovered transformative changes in curriculum or pedagogy, especially for inner-city schools, that are (in business lingo) “scalable”—that is, easily transferable to other schools, where they would predictably produce achievement gains.

The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation. Students, after all, have to do the work. If the students aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail…. The unstated assumption of much school “reform” is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers…. Motivation has weakened because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard, and don’t do well

“Against these realities, school-“reform” rhetoric is blissfully evasive. Duncan urges “a great teacher” in every classroom—akin to having every football team composed of All-Americans”

Twelve years ago, at the beginning of my unique relationship with the Montgomery County, MD Public Schools (described in “Catching Them Doing Something Right”) I started a diary. Later, as I began to note the nature of the insights being recorded I went back and renamed the computer file “Learning Log.”

Now, some 900 pages later, in order to better reflect the product of all those aggregated learnings, I’ve again re-titled it — How I Stopped Hating… and Learned to Love a School System.”

Since, like many others, my needs for autonomy and freedom to make a difference usually seem to generate automatic pushback against the “systems” around me that appear to constrain it (home, schools, work), what could produce such a major transformation in the worldview that frames my way-of-thinking?

Buckminster Fuller had suggested the answer:

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them.
Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

My tool was the lens through which I was observing the “system” (described in “Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens”).

It enabled me to “get into the heads” of those who are the system to “see” what they were seeing and feeling and ask “why?” And then to use the common answers to develop a capability that Copernicus never had to leverage the natural strengths and relationships that appear. (see The One Thing! …a simple proposal.]

This site’s content is largely the product of applying that way-of-thinking to the actual work of an “organization of learners” attempting to become a “learning organization.” And because they were “doing it” – and as outside observers began to note “very effectively” – it added urgency to the site’s purpose that was captured in the concluding paragraphs of The One Thing! …a simple proposal.

“So our task is not only simple, its clear. At a time when schools have neither the capacity, nor the societal support, to “fix” themselves, we have to develop and initiate processes that support capacity development as a practically simultaneous, inside-out, knowledge-development process.

We have to change everyone’s mental model of schooling, but fortunately, we now can use the “simple rules” imposed by what we already know about how the human mind works as it processes information to solve problems that get in the way of making a difference.

•            First individuals must have a compelling reason to change the way they look at, and understand, learning, teaching and schooling.

•            Then driven by the motivating power of understanding why new alternatives may be necessary, they need to have the means and support to work within that new paradigm.

•            Finally, they need processes to derive from that work experience the necessary knowledge and culture to sustain that way of functioning for all students.”

So… now I’ve outed myself.

As an embedded co-learner I’ve developed an appreciation, respect, (and “love”) for those whose thinking is driven by a personal need to make a difference, but find themselves in a “system” based on assumptions that they can somehow do it alone. And who have been able to learn – together – how to continually challenge those assumptions.

But, today as I look at most proposals for “systemic” reform, I realize how strongly most of them are based on unquestioned assumptions that the “system” is the hated enemy. Not until it can be “flattened,” “swept away,” “disempowered” will each child be able to learn, and all teachers be able to teach.

No wonder major foundations — unable to figure out the key to “systemic reform” –eventually downshift to disconnected building- and classroom-based changes that lack the systemic connective tissue to sustain them over time.

I wish I knew how to spread the “love” I’ve experienced. Might it help them understand school systems as the positive factors they can be, and not the negative ones they unquestionably assume they are?

I don’t know if this website can help, but we’ll keep on trying…

It’s frustrating to see someone close to the answer he/she is seeking.. but unable to see that what’s being looked for is closer than they thought.

Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s experienced education writer, who has admitted to being “obsessed” with trying to make sense of schooling by focusing on it’s high school end, shifted his attention and in his  8/30/10 column, titled: It’s time to stop obsessing over the achievement gap.–  concluded:

“Why not work at raising achievement for every child, in every demographic category, instead of obsessing about the gap?

I don’t blame politicians or journalists for enabling this deceptive mindset.  Everyone does it. It is woven into the way we think about schools, from the President on down.

But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense, or that we shouldn’t try to rethink school progress in a more useful way.”

Apparently frustrated after years of trying to help readers make sense from connecting dots among things that seemed to work…(but not for long), his dissatisfaction finally led him to dig deeper into the connected work of schooling to confront —

(1) the nature of the “problem” at the core….(a mindset that doesn’t enable understanding how simultaneously to raise achievement for every child, in every demographic category while it must also effectively respond to the special needs of some.)

(2) where the root of the problem lies …(in “everyone’s” mindset –the interwoven way within which everyone from the President on down” thinks about schools.)  And

(3)  the only way to solve it …(rethink school progress in a way not only makes sense, but is “useful.”)

No wonder he’s frustrated..  He got Covey right, but not Deming.

(Covey: “First understand.” Before you can solve a problem, you must understand it.

Deming: “By what method?” Noble aims, goals and purposes are not enough if you don’t have ways to get you there.)

If it doesn’t make sense to keep on going down a tunnel with no cheese at it’s end, and also understanding that there might be useful alternatives if there were a different way to think about the “tunnel”…   then the frustrating question he’s left with now is Deming’s. How can “everyone” change the way they “make sense” of the daily interwoven work of classrooms, schools and districts today?

Fortunately, a day or so later (9/1/10) the Post printed a response to the same achievement gap issue that suggested a beginning point for Mathews sense-making rethinking process…  And here again, someone frustrated “got it”…almost.

Aleta Margolis (Executive Director of the Center for Inspired Teaching) pointed out that

“a critical precursor to the achievement gap is the creativity gap.”…”when children are denied the opportunity to develop their skills as creative and critical thinkers, it is not surprising that their academic achievement suffers.”

“It is time to embrace an educational approach that integrates creativity and rigor into every aspect of school. Many successful examples of this kind of teaching already exist, in schools with children from all races and all levels of the socio-economic spectrum,

Perhaps programs aimed at closing the achievement gap will devise a way to focus on reducing the creativity gap as well.

All it would take is a little imagination.”

Her diagnosis is exactly right.

First, that as a child’s natural “learning” capacity develops, learning skills aren’t separable by “content” and “process.” But our present way of thinking about the work of “teaching” doesn’t offer a way to understand how to create and manage an alternative way to connect “teaching” and “learning” without unrealistic applications of time and new resources..

Yet, as she frustratingly notes, we already have on-the-ground classroom examples of the actual results-generating power of this approach that produces not only “academic results,” but also the “21^st century skills” (problem-solving, collaboration, and creative innovation) that society is demanding from resource starved schools.

And here is where her prescription: imaginative re-thinking …is what’s “almost” right. Missing is the requirement for examples of solutions that match, not just the systemic nature of the problem, but its school system-wide scope.

Rethinking requires examples of how to develop and manage an integrated, rigorous approach that involves every aspect of a school district’s learning-influencing work.

And here’s where I join the ranks of the frustrated. For right next door is the large complex school district that serves as this website’s reality base and the source of examples of how reformers “theories” play out in the interconnected world of “practice.” The Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS).

It offers a useful example of how a major school district with 144,000 students fits both Margolis’ vision and Mathew’s need for a thinking-challenging method.

Can the story of how the MCPS has been systemically developing into a full-district integrated learning management system — that engages, at one end, it’s stakeholders’ in the development of responses to the needs of all…and at the other, engages each of its students in the creative co-management of their own thinking and learning — offer the missing “ah-ha” catalysts for the critically needed rethinking?

Much has been written lately about the district’s present nature and accomplishments since its superintendent recently announced his retirement.   Much more may be forthcoming if the district gets any of the national honors for which it is being considered.

But little of that may impact the core problem condition that Mathews correctly identified: a “deceptive,” deeply interwoven “mindset” that isn’t “useful” because it doesn’t “make sense.”

Since sense-making is this “SabuSense” site’s primary purpose, if you think, as I do, that both Mathews and Margolis are right…”almost” …and if you would like to learn more about MCPS’ approach… and then possibly engage in some imaginative rethinking with me about how to use it to influence the embedded mindset that frames the way “everyone thinks about schools”… I hope you’ll join in below..

This Sabusense website is a product of the mind of Seymour Sarason who died on January 28th this year. His way-of-thinking and his “Martian” metaphor frames and generated the knowledge it now embeds.

In “The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change’’ (1971) Sarason spoke through a Martian hovering 20,000 feet above a school who couldn’t understand what the creatures below him were saying, and therefore tried to understand what was going on just by observing their regular actions. It’s purpose: to raise questions for the reader about why people would do things like that… and then regularly continue to do them?

If you’ve explored the What, Why, and How on this site’s home page you know that it documents the story of the continuing transformation of a major US school district observed through a similar 20,000 foot lens that also served to raise important “Why” questions, and then focuses in on how they were being effectively answered in ways that outside observers sometimes called “miracles,” but couldn’t quite understand.

• Now, as I reflect on the almost 4 decades since reading his book, and my subsequent interactions with him (back on the ground), it confirms the major role that Sarason played as mental-model or paradigm-shifter for me. He offered a way to see and think about the world in which I wanted to make a difference. This different way-of-making sense made it possible for me to ask different questions and see the possibilities their answers revealed.

And I wasn’t alone. In October 2000, at a Washington DC conference, Rod Paige, then Houston superintendent and soon to become Secretary of Education, told me that Sarason’s “The Culture of the School…” and its Martian also had been one of his seminal learning experiences.

Then, as I read an EdWeek Commentary (February 24, 2010), Celebrating Seymour Sarason, by Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, & Ann Lieberman describing his influence on their lives, I realized why their ideas and writings have appealed to me over the years.  Thanks to Sarason, we had an embedded “map” and were looking at the “same world.”

• Reflecting on his influence this week, I dug through our correspondence and notes from our meetings over the past 11 years, (which I’ll soon store on this site as “Seymour Sarason and our Martian Chronicles” on the chance that a grad student someday might find something research-worthy.)

Among the memories they’ve helped me re-live:

– Finding a foundation that would have the understanding to support his presentation to the 1999 AASA convention about his prescient perception that Charter schools were, and still are, “another failed (systemic) reform.”

– His reaction when I told him about the role I had taken on as Martian in the major school system whose experiences this site explores.

****

“8/17/2000

Dear “Martian”

If your experience meant much to you, so does your letter to me. It’s good to know that I am not alone in outer space!

A book of mine is coming out next spring fro TC Press – Title: American Psychology and Schools – A Critique. In it are two long chapters on Columbine High School as viewed by a Martian. Obviously, you and I this past year were fellow Martians.

I truly got a kick and an uplift from your letter. I am doing O.K. The educational scene still depresses me, which is why I so appreciated your letter. If you ever write up your experience, please send me a copy.

Warmest regards,’

Sy”

****

—    And frequently we shared frustrations generated by the reality of a “depressing” educational scene that from “20,000 Feet” didn’t make sense.

Later, I would characterize this frustration as a perceptual “curse”– (See Copernicus’ Curse and Galileo’s Pain. This is what it feels like when you see the “reality” that generates a “theory”… and regardless of what others say about that theory… you unfortunately no longer can “unsee” it.

My own example, expressed in a 1999 note about the “enemy” created by “The Common Sense of Common Practice,” ended with:

****

… “I could go on, Seymour… but I won’t. This much has provided an outlet for some of my frustration and I appreciate your reading it. I realize however that I’m being driven not just by the frustration of Copernicus, who only provided a different worldview map, but of a NASA that realizes we have sufficient knowledge, people, and technologies to actually get where we want to go. But without the “map” of reality, people can’t see how it “makes sense.”

….“My recent experiences with the Charter Schools Scaffolding process strategy I developed has only increased this frustration. [I think I sent you an early draft – Scaffolding Sustained School System Change.]

Maybe R.D. Laing better captured my “problem” and in fewer words when he wrote:

Noticing

The range of what we think and do

is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice

that we fail to notice

there is little we can do

to change

until we notice

how failing to notice

shapes our thoughts and deeds.

… Where’s your damn Martian, now that I need him?”

****

—   Now, 11 years later because of the time I’ve spent on the ground using that Martian’s lens to illuminate the practical truths made visible by his ways-of-thinking, my frustration has compounded.

This is evident in this site’s last posting which explored the question of why the Harvard Business School, and not it’s Graduate School of Education, studied the school district this site focuses on, and then published a book that led the Washington Post in a front page article to claim that
it “… presents … Montgomery as a model for other school districts to follow.”

(In the Tangled Jungle of School Reform Harvard… and Sabu
Find a “Classroom” Teaching Different Lessons)

Again, Seymour had suggested why. Ten years earlier he had noted that while psychological and educational theorists focused on individual behavior, business schools address “organizational behavior that dealt with structure and dynamics (when, why changes do or do not occur and with what consequences.”  They were “asking the right questions,” he felt, “important questions with significances, theoretical and practical,” for education and psychology.”

But without a way of understanding the complementarity of organizational and individual behavior, (see The Quantum Paradox) he noted there was an ”unverbalized assumption that schools had no organizational-behavioral similarities to corporations or any other complicated, non-educational institutions. (but he maintained accurately)…Schools are not unique organizations.”

•    So Sy…. thanks (as Fullan, Hargreaves and Lieberman also concluded) for “opening our minds, emboldened our actions, and challenged our souls…”

BUT, I repeat…

….Where’s your damn Martian, now that WE ALL need him?”

Lew

HARVARD… AND SABU
Find a “Classroom” Teaching DIFFERENT Lessons

Several months ago I was asked by AASA’s journal The School Administrator to review a new Harvard Business School publication — “Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools” by Stacey Childress, Denis Doyle, and David Thomas. This presented an interesting challenge because AASA wanted a short, and an objective review.

As readers of this site know, the book is about the same school system that serves as the reality check for the way-of-thinking this site attempts to capture. For the past 10 years I’ve been an embedded learner in, and thinking partner with, that district. Some initial learnings were offered in a 2003 School Administrator article – “Systemic Learning & Acting: A close-up observer finds a school district behaving as if it were a system.”

While this relationship might seem to make an objective review difficult, I found it offered a dimension of understanding enabling me to better gauge the relevance of both the book’s content… and the context from which it emerged.

• Why, for example, was this a product of Harvard’s school of business, not education?
• And how does this large complex school district’s experience relate to President Obama’s, Bill Gates’ and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s ”race-to-the-top”?

AASA’s format also required a short review, not a long article. But if I took seriously their boilerplate instructions to reviewers…

“Consider the review of the book to be a consumer service. Provide an honest critique which means if the book in your view would fail to meet the needs or interests of the typical superintendent, you ought to say so and explain why…..Critical or balanced reviews are actually more valuable than raves given the limitations of time for book reading among most superintendents.”

…I wasn’t sure that within the 350-word limit I could meet their underlying requirements for “an honest critique” that would “meet the needs or interests of the typical superintendent. …who has “limitations of time for book reading.”

In this case, I believed “honesty” required saying why I thought it does address “needs and interests” of all Superintendents who are in the “business” of schooling to make a difference for all the kids and teachers in their districts. And whose difference-making, like other CEO’s, requires continually juggling all of the system’s parts and processes, even while losing hope that it’s possible to have the time and support to do it.

But the space limits were a reality and my challenge was to work within them to act on my belief that this book differed from the many excellent publications today dealing with knowledge superintendents should, and someday must, know. But which many times don’t seem to touch a superintendent’s core concern of “what can I do on Monday” with this knowledge that will influence what happens to children today in my district?

So in the soon-to-be-published review, below, I chose to use the allotted space to raise questions more than preview the answers they’ll find. My intention: to engage the reader’ interest enough to want to find out more. And then to use this website to begin to tell the rest of the story, and its important implications for the critical agendas of those trying to effectively use their resources to facilitate a national race-to-the-top.

For those interested in that “rest of story” and its implications for their own leadership and for current national reform, you also will  find the longer review I would have liked to have published, followed by mini-reviews of two articles by same authors published since the book came out —

• An Education Week Commentary, “Moving Beyond the Conventional Wisdom of Whole District Reform,”
• A November ‘09 KAPPAN article, “Six Lessons for Pursuing Excellence and Equity at Scale: Efforts in Montgomery County, Maryland, to ‘raise the bar and close the gap’ depended on deep changes.”

These homed in on the their concluding “Six Lessons” which they had seen as a “Call to Action” for the rest of the country’s urban schools.

In future Sabusense postings I’ll begin to explore both the content and context of the MCPS story — The Lesson of the Lessons… and its Deeper Implications for current national reform efforts… and possibly for the Harvard School of Business itself.

***********

(To be published in the February 2010 issue of The School Administrator)

************

The Rest of The Story…

(What I would have liked to have published…)

“By Jove…they got it… they really got it!” While reading this book I kept hearing that refrain from My Fair Lady. But when finished I had a different realization: “Why…. How could that be?”

• How could the Washington Post in a front page article claim that
“‘Leading for Equity,’ … presents … Montgomery as a model for other school districts to follow,”

…and David Gergen, in the book’s introduction say that the
“authors … Call to Action … is grounded in their research in Montgomery County but is aimed at the larger national conversation about transforming public education…”

• …while the Post’s own longtime and respected education reporter criticized it and its Harvard Business School authors, (“6 Lessons From Montgomery County Public Schools That Mostly Missed the Point”) for looking
“at Montgomery’s remarkable success in raising student achievement as if they were analyzing Wal-Mart’s marketing triumphs. It is all about process. People who deal with this sort of stuff in their own jobs will be intrigued. ……I, however, write about teachers, and I am not quite as thrilled with the book as the folks hanging around the business school’s soda machine might be.”

• And how could Secretary of Education Arne Duncan believe that “Montgomery County is “one of the examples of whole district transformation that shows us the way,” while several major reform and research organizations studied the same school district and left with few learnings they felt applicable to the immediate and long-range concerns of America’s most needy students in its most needy schools?

For me, I found the answers in the concept that “while content may be king, context is the kingdom.” This book’s content is important, but the context (or way-of-thinking) from which it emerged is what gives it unique meaning and significance for the entangled problems of leadership that characterize today’s schooling and the failed attempts to improve it.
In particular, what can this bigger picture tell us about why these “non-educator” researchers “got” what their “educator” peers seemingly did not?  And what are its implications for systemic reform?

Benchmarking a way-of-thinking

Initial responses to this book make it clear that this school district’s behavior doesn’t fit the “theories” of what school systems are “supposed” to do. That’s why it helps that this book’s authors’ have a “different” way of understanding and thinking about schools as organizations.

While other observers had focused on, and tried to benchmark MCPS’ What’s and How’s, the Harvard Business School authors concentrated on the Why – a deeper level of organizational understanding that is important because it is common to all work settings in both education and business. From this perspective they’ve attempted to benchmark the MCPS way-of-thinking, and the roles a superintendent plays as a shaper of other’s thinking. Or as the MCPS superintendent calls it – as a Teacher-on-Special-Assignment.

This has been the authors’ lens. And to the extent that your experience leads you to share their beliefs, you’ll find much of value. But, ironically, it may contribute most to those who don’t believe effective improvement of a large, complex school system is possible.

Why? Because a Possibility Paradox stands in the way of scaling up and sustaining “what works” possibilities. When time and resources are in short supply, it is what we don’t believe possible to do “today” that has the power to trump the “someday” hopes of the soundest teaching and learning theories and practices.

As a consequence, culture-creating “impossibility beliefs” frame the “box” that we’re supposed to “think outside of.” Yet the scale and nature of this district’s work over 10 years was changing that box for those working inside it. Through epiphany-generating work experiences that proved that the impossible was possible, it was influencing the beliefs and thinking that underlie “culture.” For example,

1. While we believe in the “possibility” that every child can learn, we often don’t accept at the same level of assurance that all children already are learning; every child comes pre-wired to learn. That is until, as in this district, we see support for that belief demonstrated in ways that can be sustained for every child, not just some.

2. We believe that “teaching” is the interaction of a single teacher with a student. We don’t accept at the same level of assurance that teaching actually is a collaborative process whose success requires the active involvement of more than one person … until we can see what happens when the “dots” outside the classroom in the building and district connect to support each teacher’s vital interactions with each child.

But then…
3. We don’t yet believe in the possibility that the school district already is a system in which effective teaching and learning can happen in each of its classrooms, in every one of its school buildings everyday.

And we won’t …until we have a way to see and experience a district creating and sustaining the interconnecting processes that enable that to happen regardless of changes in personnel, community politics and resources. Understanding the what’s and how’s of that systemic experience is what makes the MCPS story significant.

Whether or not this district’s story can provide “a model for other school districts to follow,” or influence “the larger national conversation about transforming public education” or even fulfill Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s belief that “Montgomery County is “one of the examples of whole district transformation that shows us the way” will depend upon overriding the underlying power of that deeper third “impossibility belief.”

Unfortunately, there have been few epiphany-producing experiences (in education) to counter that 3rd disbelief and demonstrate why this understanding provides the only sustainable context for the possibilities that are created by the first two beliefs. For decades epiphanies similar to the first two have driven reformer’s and practitioners support of many classroom and building improvements. But in the end, those improvements faded away with the departure of the teachers and principals who held the beliefs.

And, over time, this seeming inability for effective practices to remain rooted, scale up and spread to others has, in itself, produced the most powerful and limiting impossibility belief — public schools are systemically unchangeable as presently structured.

Without ways to experience how that 3rd belief about the district-as-a-system plays out in practice, policymakers will continue to seek non-systemic alternatives. Their options: break the system into separate and supposedly more manageable pieces, outsource many of its functions, or get rid of it completely.

In this small book the Harvard authors haven’t been able to tell the full story and they struggle with how to connect leadership to learning without making it seem to be (as they put it) the story of the exploits of a “super” superintendent. They defaulted to the phrase “Weast and his team” which, while accurate, doesn’t really get to the critical story of the development of that team, the scope and nature of its “teamness” and the developing understanding of the processes of systemic governance and systemic management that sustain it.

It attempts, more successfully, to present the story of a district that has been closing the gap between methods and mindset that is a daunting barrier to systemic improvements in the core work of schools and classrooms.  The authors’ conclusion is that it’s about a different “mindset” – a way-of-thinking that can give practical meaning to the “methods.”

It’s a mindset critically needed by national leaders “racing to the top” without an adequate road map of the mountain they must navigate.  And without methods that can  work systemically…now.

************

Continuing the Story…

Published or not, the telling of the MCPS story hasn’t ended. It seems clear to the Harvard authors (as it is to me) that the lessons that already can be drawn from this continuing experience are directly applicable to the problems of today’s urban schools. But it apparently isn’t to others who have the potential to act comprehensively on it.

This creates a new problem — those of us who have been “learners’ must now be “teachers.” This can be a ”teachable moment,” but it may be missed if it can’t connect to ”learnable moments” for those currently seeking to make more immediate large-scale differences.

• Where might be there be learners whose readiness-to-learn is backed up by a realistic sense of urgency and who already have the knowledge and resources to act meaningfully on it?    (In subsequent postings we will address three that come to mind who seek short-term systematic tactics that fit with their long-term systemic strategies: the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation and the Harvard Business School itself.)

• How can knowledge based on what has been learned from MCPS’ lessons be applied in ways that enable it to show up in sustainable school district “performance” – the only criterion that suggests its been learned?

Recognizing these needs, after the book’s publication the Harvard Business School authors extended their thoughts with two articles that homed in on their concluding “Six Lessons” which they saw as a “Call to Action” for the rest of the country’s urban schools.

1. In an Education Week Commentary, “Moving Beyond the Conventional Wisdom of Whole District Reform,” Stacey Childress accurately described the nature and scope of the problem of whole district reform, and the problem’s source — the seldom-challenged conventional wisdom.

The nature: “school districts must take on two difficult tasks at once: raising the outcomes of top performing students while at the same time accelerating the learning of students who are behind.”

And the scope: “And they must find ways to do this in every school, not just a few exemplars.”

The seldom-challenged conventional advice: “Hire great principals and teachers, make data-driven decisions, hold everyone accountable, build a strong culture, and engage stakeholders”

…all seemingly-sensible strategies which strangely had not yet responded to the scope, nature and time demands of the problem — “few were delivering excellence and equity for all of their students.”

In MCPS, on the other hand, they had found a school system functioning at a “deeper level than conventional advice” and offered “six lessons” from their story to help make sense of it.

2. The Harvard authors then turned to what could be learned from MCPS’ attacking the problem of scale and inclusiveness at this deeper level. In a November ‘09 KAPPAN article, Six Lessons for Pursuing Excellence and Equity at Scale: Efforts in Montgomery County, Maryland to “raise the bar and close the gap,” they attempted to connect what they had seen to these deep changes.

Again noting that the unquestioned common advice from academics, consultants, and foundations (hire great principals and teachers, make data-driven decisions, hold everyone accountable, build a strong culture, and engage stakeholders) did not deliver their promised systemic results for all students today, they looked at the unique progress MCPS had already been making as a system, and what they had learned about how they did it.

What was distinctive, they asked, about MCPS’ focus on the same few core ideas? Digging deeper beneath what the district did, they looked across their implementation to better understand how they did it and why it was working.

Here they captured stories that supported the learnings from each of the lessons. But in the end, they acknowledged their problem in “capturing the complexity of the work in Montgomery County.”

“Yes, Montgomery County made data-driven decisions, engaged stakeholders, and hired great people in its efforts to provide excellence and equity for all of its students. But such pithy phrases as “hire great people” fail to capture the complexity of the work in Montgomery County. Like many districts, MCPS had plenty of great people back when there were 35-point achievement gaps.
Great people thrive in healthy organizations that enlist them in the pursuit of ambitious, meaningful goals and provide them with the powerful strategies and support systems necessary to reach those goals.”

Their “six lessons” capture some of how the leadership team in Montgomery County has been developing a “healthy” organization connected by “powerful” strategic support systems that engage their staff in fulfilling simultaneously their own and the system’s goals.

3. But as every good teacher knows, even with the best of lessons, learning isn’t guaranteed.

Therefore, since this site’s dual intentions are to influence:

• how we think about schools… by offering a different lens through which to view what we see people doing every day in schools , and

• what we think about those actions… by focusing that lens on a coherent, ten-year body of systemic wisdom (knowledge woven on the loom of experience)

…we’ll be using this site’s perspective and content to more deeply explore this unique resource that external research by itself cannot usually access (and which usually falls through the cracks as it’s carriers move on).  And then to suggest the relevance of both the content and context of the MCPS story for addressing urban education’s present conditions.

Therefore, in the next posting — The Lesson of the Lessons… and its Deeper Implications — we’ll focus on that lesson’s prerequisite ”learning” for those committed to sustained systemic change  — that while Content is king… Context is the kingdom.

We’ll outline a case for why and how what’s been learned from this district’s experiences can offer a unique opportunity to advance two major systemic reform initiatives, the current national reform efforts of the Obama Administration and the Gates Foundation and will suggest two potential strategies to do it.

• A Teaching for America strategy to understand why systemic school system transformation must be done, and

• A Rosetta Stone strategy to understand how it can be done.

Then, as it is now, the site will be open for discussion by those who want to join in this way of thinking about what can be done today.

To start at the beginning of the 4-part article, go to Sharing the Pain: Drilling Beneath the 5th Why… and finding a tangled surprise.

The 3rd Root Cause: The Gap-Causing Gap

What I like about that metaphoric Sistine Chapel picture in Part II (The 1st Root Cause: The Quantum Paradox) is that while it illustrates two critical, and related, conditions that independently drive the nature and structure of the work of people-serving organizations… it also includes a third – an almost unnoticed disconnecting gap between them.

And it’s this gap that turns out to be largely responsible for today’s more familiar “gaps” in student achievement and organizational results that we hear so much about… and whose “closing” has become the primary strategic focus of most major reform efforts.

Critics often seem to expect that somehow policies will miraculously flow smoothly through a system to emerge as practices at the other end. (The late John Gardner termed this a “Penny Gumball Machine” belief — i.e., a coin inserted at the top produces gumballs at the bottom.) That they don’t may be attributed to this disconnecting gap between the purposes driving the daily actions of those at the system’s two ends. Some are accountable for what happens to all, others to each.

Usually we don’t have opportunities to think much about this each or all nature of the purposes to which daily decisions in school systems respond, especially when those who have to deal with the needs of each child and those who have to deal with needs of all of them work in relative isolation from each other.

As a result, the two fingers often seem to end up pointing at, and blaming, each other for limiting their ability to make a difference for “all” or for “each.” Listen to the battles over control of urban school systems today, or about the consequences of No Child Left Behind and note how system-fixing prescriptions usually seem to start with a blame-fixing blame diagnosis.

As a consequence, many of today’s arguments seem to meet the definition of an “autoimmune disease” where “either/or” battles between the parts of a system eventually destroy its actual “both/and” nature. For those committed to systemic reform, that’s the most serious consequence of this unnoticed gap.

Its unthinking acceptance as an unbridgeable divide with adversaries on each “side” means that, regardless of attempts to develop “systems thinking,” it effectively frustrates thought and action that can address the reality that the Sufi’s elephant is a pre-existing “given.” The both/and “system” that generates “results” is already there. It’s not a hoped-for “end,” but the only starting point for development.

• But, as I’ve noted, the negative consequences of that condition weren’t as evident in the district I was observing. There, the two hands might be perceived as reaching out for each other, “somehow” knowing the integral connection of their two purposes. (Deming once described the relationship as the answer to “Who do I need, and who needs me?”) As an example, while its neighbor, the DC Public Schools framed its reform battle as one between a teacher’s union and a superintendent who, alone, wanted what’s “best for children,” the three employee unions in MCPS were voting to give back some of their negotiated benefits to help the district survive the current economic crises that threatened all children.

• To better understand the 5th why of how this was happening, I returned to the Sufi – the ancient people whose parable “ The Blind Men and the Elephant” captures so well the holistic nature of the problem of organization-fixing. It turns out they had another saying that goes to the nature of the “blindness” of those whose understanding of the whole is comprised of the sum of its parts.

You think you understand one.
You think you understand two, because one and one make two.
But, you must also understand “and“.

Century’s later management researcher Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” would frustratingly discover the same thing.

“I’ll tell you the one thing I have been incredibly frustrated with, though. Probably the thing that …I’ve had to most hammer into people, what people don’t get as easily — is that the BTL ideas are very much about the “And.”

One of the things that really has frustrated me has been peoples’ perception that BTL is about preservation, conservation, stasis, stability. To be built to last, you have to be built to change.

…you have to preserve the core and stimulate progress. This requires an institutional set of processes that map to a very, very deep primal human distinction: our need to believe and our need to create.

…So, if you were to say what I have learned since Built To Last, it’s that people didn’t get the “and.”

Bridging Schooling’s “AND” Gap

To better understand the significance of this third factor for the systemic transformation of the work of all schools, lets look more closely at the “AND” gap’s present consequences for the work of schooling.

Caught between the pressures for personal and organizational accountability — one intrinsic, the other extrinsic — and not recognizing the nature of the condition constraining them — school practitioners have been forced into a form of organizational schizophrenia.

They find themselves functioning in two seemingly disconnected “systems.” One (a school and its classrooms) intended to meet the needs of each child, the other (usually a central office) to meet the needs of all. And the scope of these separate accountabilities affects the nature of what people in each system think they can do.

The only thing manageable seems to be to take conditions on a one-at-a-time or an either-or basis. Why? Because, on a practical level, we “know” we have neither the time nor resources to deal with them both simultaneously. Even though at some level we feel they are inseparable sides of the same problem, we still have trouble figuring out what to do about it — e.g., what has to happen within the organization to convert the “all-ness” of curriculum to the “each-ness” of instruction?

And curriculum and instruction isn’t the only issue where we face this either-or dilemma. It seems evident that it also affects the “problems” of:

• content and/or process,
• accountability and/or responsibility,

and most important in the end…

• equity and/or excellence.

(For a fuller illustration of how the “AND” gap” results in school districts operating as if they were two disconnected systems see New Understanding: The Complementarity of Policy and Practice)

Seeing the gap

This site’s approach to rethinking the complexities of schooling — and its observations of a major school district dealing with them — are predicated on a simple principle and a simple tool.

The principle: What we DO is driven by what we THINK,
…what we think is shaped by what we BELIEVE and
…what we believe is rooted in our EXPERIENCE.

This is the intrinsic cycle that creates and sustains the “culture” we accept as just-the-way-it-is.

This principle changed the direction and nature of our why-asking search to understand the work the school system exists to support. The result: a back-mapping process that began with the regular experiences they’ve been building into the structure of work that appeared to have changed beliefs in ways that were leading to different ways of thinking …and then doing as a system. And, in particular, it provided a way to understand the value of new structures they developed to bridge the disconnecting, and disempowering, “gaps” in their work.

The tool: It’s hard to “believe” what we can’t “see.”

“Alice’s Looking Glass” addresses the perceptual problem that creates gaps in understanding. We “see” people and not the areas between them that separate them in time and space. (That’s why we draw organization and flow charts as attempts to get our leadership minds and management hands around them.)

1. It offers a way to see the “ands” in terms of the common information-exchange nature of the work relationships they encompass. This way-of-seeing reframes and realigns the work of those individuals, and offers opportunities to rethink the relationships and roles that presently fill the gaps between them.

2. It can serve as a plot board for identifying where needed gap-spanning bridges need to be built

3. As a tool for understanding, it offers a simple theory of practice that seems to address an observation that has been attributed to both Einstein and Yogi Berra:

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”

(See Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens and New Understanding: A needed Role map)

Spanning the gap

The most divisive effect of the “gap”-gap is its impact on the flow of continual information that needs to be exchanged in the work of managing learning (individual and organizational). “Bridging” it, however, is not simple. A new information system won’t do it, because ways to “construct” or “develop” connections from both its ends is required.

Permanently spanning the gap between the two “fingers” of Policy and Practice requires an organizational commitment that often depends upon “leaps” of faith by its leaders. Unfortunately, these seldom translate into sustainable structures for a school district’s work when the leaders change. To overcome that, regular structures are required that can engage and support everyone involved in the “work,” (including those of little faith.)

The lesson drawn from this district is that the needed “faith” develops from a shifting of trust in “leaders” to a trust in processes whose personal value people have experienced for themselves.

That’s why I’ve found “Scaffolding” to be a more appropriate term for understanding the structural significance of how this school system has been addressing this condition because it fit seems to fit both definitions of “Scaffold:”

1. a temporary structure for holding workman and materials during the repair of a permanent structure

2. In learning, a temporary support shoring up a new behavior that fades out as the new ways of acting become internalized and natural. For example, training wheels, or an adult running alongside, as a child learns to balance and ride a two-wheel bicycle.

This scaffolding infrastructure provides

• a work setting where old beliefs can be challenged and the value of new beliefs experienced.
• operational experiences from which new beliefs can be tested operationally, reinforced and develop into sustainable structures
• Questions/problems that already engage people’s intrinsic problem-solving capacities can be built into the work process.
• Development of their capacity to answer them in their own contexts within the system that can be supported through embedded training, access to information, and peer support.
• means to address the requirement that one’s role in the system often may require skills and knowledge different from job skills.

Metaphorically, the “scaffolding” underlying this district’s work today adds a “method” to the previously-noted leadership insight and “simple rule” that “The success of the “wave” is a product of the natural “potentials” already embedded in each “particle.”

Their experiences demonstrate how mutual “success” of the “particles” and the “wave” can be a product of the manageable, sustainable structures built across this gap that release those potentials.

In future blog postings I’ll offer examples of what I’ve learned from how they are doing it. Among them:

• How bridges between the Quantum nature of “Policies for ALL” and “Practices for EACH” accountabilities can be developed from collaborative problem-solving processes which create interactions that tap the powers of the embedded X-Factors.

In the meantime some of the ideas are more fully explored in the Scaffolding Strategy Memo (pdf) and at “Work as Knowledge-Creation and Management, …and the Mind as the Workplace” in Mapping the Natural Territory.

…“At the End of the Day”

The concept “At the End of the day….” has become a popular catch phrase for describing results that ultimately will make current efforts worthwhile. It hopefully answers why they are worth doing.

At the end of Sabu’s day these postings digging down to the 5th Why will have little value if they can’t contribute needed understanding back up on the surface where daily battles that are the consequences of the quantum “particle and wave” condition continue to be fought on top of the bodies (and minds) of children, teachers, principals and superintendents in today’s schools.

And where major national plans to do something about them appear headed for the same non-sustainable fate as four decades of their predecessors.

Hopefully, some may find insights useful for their own rethinking of their “part” of the school system ”elephant” and its current survival needs. But the most critical re-thinkers are those who have already made “end-of-the-day” commitments to visions that offer promises…but without realistic pathways.

The most important is President Obama. At the end of the day he has promised that the short and long term results of the needed $100 billion Stimulus Package will stimulate a “rethinking of education” out of which can emerge a “New Vision for a 21st Century Educational System.”

But apparently, the re-thinking he is calling for will come only after stimulus funds are spent supporting, scaling up, and better understanding what works “innovations.” Good ideas that in the past – because of the Quantum Paradox – may have worked… but not for long.

But does that rethinking really to wait?

The learnings captured on this site suggest a counter-inter-intuitive alternative. A strategy for rethinking What Works Systemically that can produce meaningful initial products that can enable the Obama/Duncan” “Rethinking 21st Century Educational System” strategy to run in parallel with the initial roll-out of the stimulus funding, and produce mutual learning exchanges as they go.

If you are interested in what that looks like and then may have ideas to add to it, let me know and I’ll post it on the Sabusense blog.

The 2nd Root Cause: The X-Factor

(see Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens.)

Paradoxes — those puzzling, seemingly illogical, conundrums have become a regular part of today’s educational environment. (For a full discussion see Paradoxes in the Present Paradigm (pdf)) Two things we know about these puzzles:

[1] They appear when we can’t make sense of what we experience in our lives.  It doesn’t fit the beliefs that shape our mental models/paradigms/worldviews.  By labeling it a “paradox” we can work around it as a “just-the-way-it-is” part of the work.

[2] Their solutions usually involve finding something within the situation that isn’t being accounted for — an unknown logical X-factor.  And according to Marilyn Furguson, this can become the organizing principle for a new sense-making paradigm.

“A new paradigm involves a principle that was present all along but unknown to us.  It includes the old as a partial truth, one aspect of How Things Work, while allowing for things to work in other ways as well.”

Can this be our problem?  Can there be “a principle …present all along” that we’ve been missing, and which could serve as the center point of a “paradigm”/ a way-of-thinking that could resolve the paradoxes?

This site is predicated on the belief that there is… (see Making Sense Through a Systemic Leadership and Management Lens)

It’s based on a “simple” principle from cognitive biology.  Stated metaphorically:

• Everyone comes pre-wired for trial and error learning with a brain-embedded “OS” (Operating System) that initially manages information-seeking and -gathering interactions with the environment, and then sends the products off for “processing” in the “software” of the mind.
• This is the driving core of an individual child’s or adult’s difference-making, meaning-seeking continual exchanges with the surrounding world.
• Moreover, it is the asset that teachers and schools have struggled for centuries to engage (through concepts such as “motivation”) and develop as a sustained capacity so that students would leave their care in charge of their own learning for life.

For me, I’ve found that understanding this X-factor can be a paradox- and paradigm-buster because it explains the perceptual learning disability that has limited the understanding of intelligent, well-meaning educators, policymakers, foundation officials, and business persons who, over the past 40 years, have failed to make sustainable improvements in the common work of schools.

And that’s another paradox. They deeply believe they know the scope and nature of that “Work” from life-long personal experiences. But apparently they don’t… or else why would we hear words like these from those who try to make sense of that work?

(from Seymour Sarason) “When you read the myriad of recommendations these commission reports contain, it becomes clear that they are not informed by any conception of a system.  That is a charitable assessment. . .  those outside the system with responsibility for articulating a program for reform have nothing resembling a holistic conception of the system they seek to influence.” –

How can that be?

(from Kenneth G. Wilson, Nobel Prize winner in physics, and later co-author of Redesigning Education [1994,] who was asked by the State of Ohio to study its educational problems.)

“The research that I studied paints a far grimmer picture of United States education than I was aware of.  Firstly, it showed that money alone cannot solve our problems.  …some of the deep problems which afflict financially-strapped inner city schools are also found in Ivy League science departments, as well as in private schools educating the sons and daughters of billionaires. …

But the real shock, for me, was to learn that the problems of educational reform have no known solution, for any price, despite centuries of thought.

…Fortunately, I find the situation in current education can be characterized not as a hopeless mess, but rather as an outdated paradigm of schooling and school reform, just as Copernicus found that the earth-centered Ptolemaic model of the solar system was inadequate.”

How can that be?

(Or from Peter Senge) “… Many confronting the deeper nature of our problems cry out that the solution lies in “fixing education.”  But you cannot “fix” a structure that was never designed for learning in the first place.”

Never designed for learning in the first place…how can that be?

As counter-intuitive as that may seem, Senge’s right.  Viewing these structures through Alice’s Looking Glass reveals their actual nature as ways to manage the work of teaching, not the work of learning.

What we’ve been creating over the years — from the one-room school house to the “factory model” schools of today — have been work settings to efficiently and effectively manage the human, time, and material instructional resources that we believed could produce the “results” or “products” society expected.  And we’ve labeled that resulting mix of information, skills, and feelings — “learning.”

This seems to be the model reformers continually try to fix by developing ways to quantify and measure that “learning” as a “product,” and then to hold the managers of the workplace accountable for producing it.  Yet they still haven’t been able to find ways to make that model work for all children.

So what if Senge’s right….

….and the work structures in this model weren’t designed for “learning in the first place?”

What might be different if the work of a school system was designed to support “learning?”  The school district story on this site offers clues.

First, we would notice that there has been another manageable and measurable product there all along that seems to meet the X-Factor criterion —  “…present all along but unknown to us.  It includes the old as a partial truth, one aspect of ‘How Things Work’, while allowing for things to work in other ways as well.”

This is the Learning Process.  As viewed through Alice’s Looking Glass it can be understood as a developable individual capacity – a process — not just the products of that process alone.

Moreover, it’s an information-using and information-creating process fed by manageable interchanges created by the adults accountable for its development as a sustainable individual capacity.

The key values of a paradigm with the Learning Process as its center point seem to be:

1) It is an individual process in which the student plays a primary management role. This  can be seen when the same lens was used to view MCPS’ 10-year systemic journey. Many of their successes have at their core the tapping of students’ intrinsic nature as learners, and then engaging and supporting them as co-managers of that learning with teachers and others. (You’ll find examples of this by linking to the site’s Catch Them Doing Something Right.)

This understanding of a usually untapped role for the learner makes available, in a manageable way, one of schooling’s most scarce resources – time.  Not the teacher’s time for teaching, but the time for learning that the student controls.  As can be observed in these classrooms, it offers an organizational Way that can be driven by individual Will.

(See Monte Roberts and Natural Learning (pdf) and New Understanding: The X-factor at work)

2) School systems are the primary sustainable work setting that can be, and must be, held accountable for the development of that capacity, not just its products. As can be seen in aspects of the school system’s journey presented on this site, district processes and practices that support that individual growth in each classroom can be developed, aligned and supported.

3) Most significantly, with this X-Factor at it’s center, this way-of-thinking offers a coherent model for understanding a school system’s work as the development of an Integrated Learning Management System — A system “designed for learning in the first place.’

But first, there’s another “painful” mind-stretching problem…

The clue to unraveling these two core roots was concealed between them.

But there was “gain” in the “pain.”  The good news was that it turned out to be a third factor that potentially offered a hands-on way to untwist and free up the natural power inherent in each “root.” (See Part IV: Sharing the Pain)