Re: [xmca] Centralized vs. Distributed decision-making in schools

[Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>]

Returning to the conversation after an absence …

Part of the point I was trying to make was about the need for more than just teachers to be involved in decision-making at the local level. Many local school districts in the US are rather autocratic, with superintendents making too many of the decisions, and many schools also have autocratic principals. There is a very authoritarian streak in the field of Education in the US. For all that American ideology touts us as the freedom-loving people, and castigates the Germans as autocratic and the French as overly centralizing, I believe this country is much more authoritarian in its basic leanings that is usually acknowledged.

But we also have a counter-tradition, a sort of populist libertarianism, which has regrettably been co-opted by the right. If you don't like your dictator, then you want to be free to do as you please. But if there's a problem or crisis, then you want a dictator to go in and solve it by telling everybody else what to do.

This contradiction is alive and relevant in educational policy. No one wants somebody else telling them how to run their local schools, but a lot of people want someone to tell everybody else how to run theirs. Locally libertarian, globally fascist.

The problem on the ground with decentralized control of schools is that the local people don't have any very different ideas about how to do schooling compared to anyone else. Our educational tradition is a monoculture. The classroom-curriculum-testing model, the age-graded sequencing, all the structural features -- most of which I would argue are seriously dysfunctional for the 21st century -- would remain untouched on the whole (with of course the occasional local exceptions).

The primary local force for real change in how schooling is done and what gets taught are the students themselves. They know how much they hate the current system and how phony and ineffective it is. And they are endlessly creative (or at least imaginative, even if many of their ideas won't work out). At the LCHC today we talked with the co-organizer of a pretty successful umbrella group of after-school programs, and it was very clear that the core of their success is the fact that they listen to the students about what the students want, and then piggyback other kinds of learning on top of the buy-in the students have for their own ideas about what they're interested in learning.

I certainly agree with Peter than if teachers had more freedom to teach as they wish, some of them would do a much better job (and some of them would not). If they did not have to teach for a fixed curriculum and test, they COULD be more responsive to how they perceive the real needs of their own students (or not). But I am pretty sure that most of them would continue to teach both what and how they've been teaching, and their students would be only marginally more satisfied if at all with their educational experience. The more radical changes that are needed may not require a socialist revolution, but they do require a basic change in the moral and political calculus by which we determine just how much say students have a right to have over their own lives and their own educations.

Power to the Teachers! Power to the Students!

JAY.

Jay Lemke
Senior Research Scientist
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
Adjunct Full Professor, Department of Communication
University of California - San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, California 92093-0506

New Website: www.jaylemke.com 



On Apr 1, 2012, at 7:23 AM, Michael Glassman wrote:

> Hi Peter,
> 
> Perhaps I am idealistic and looking through rose colored glasses, but I simply do not remember this level of corruption since before the New Deal - from top to bottom.   You have anecdotal evidence - there was not as much of a revolving door between those who create the policies and those who make money off of those policies - and there is are larger data sets - income distribution has not been this skewed since the guilded age.  "Always was and always will be" and "This is the best system we have" I have found to be not very constructive ways of looking at the world.
> 
> And yes, that's my point - that is the way things are now and rearranging administrative structures probably won't help and may even make things worse.
> 
> Michael
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Peter Smagorinsky
> Sent: Sun 4/1/2012 10:03 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Centralized vs. Distributed decision-making in schools
> 
> 
> 
> Michael, I think I can say with confidence that these things are happening right now, and have been happening for as long as I can remember: "If you send eudcation decisions back to the local level I worry that teachers will face the same problems.  Even now principals and school boards run around touting how their test scores are superior to the community next door and that's why they deserve power and a raise.  It might even have the reverse effect of pitting administrators even more against teachers, and administrators demanding complete power because they are the "bosses."  Parents, especially those in marginalized populations, are still dependent on general information sources for what is a "good" school and will many will be conned into believing test scores tell them something of extraordinary importance."
> 
> It'd be nice to get rid of corruption. But that seems pretty idealistic to me. I doubt if it's worse now than in previous eras, if my reading of history is accurate.
> 
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Michael Glassman
> Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2012 8:28 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] Centralized vs. Distributed decision-making in schools
> 
> I've been following this excellent discussion because it is close to my heart.  These days I am thinking more that the problem lies in process, not in structure - and until we change processes that changing structure is more or less rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  As long as we are following a suffoicating neo-liberal model where the goal is a bottom line that is easily measurable, offers very easy results that people can aggregate and compare, and we believe that success is measured in the aggregation, I do not believe it matters whether education is structured through a centralized model or a distributed model.  We also need to do something about the pervasive corruption within our society.  If you send eudcation decisions back to the local level I worry that teachers will face the same problems.  Even now principals and school boards run around touting how their test scores are superior to the community next door and that's why they deserve power and a raise.  It might even have the reverse effect of pitting administrators even more against teachers, and administrators demanding complete power because they are the "bosses."  Parents, especially those in marginalized populations, are still dependent on general information sources for what is a "good" school and will many will be conned into believing test scores tell them something of extraordinary importance.
> 
> Any change in education I think won't happen from a top down change in structure, but a grass roots organization within individual communities, including development of information sources and open discussions about what a worthwhile education system means.  It also has to be combined with the idea that every student have the same amount of resources.
> 
> Michael
> 
> ____
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