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

[Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>]

Thanks Jay. One thing to keep in mind is that op-eds in newspapers, even those online, have to be short and pithy. They're not like academic essays that can go on for 40 pages. Editors are looking for authors to make points in 500-800 words, although Valerie Strauss has given me some extra words because she has no space restrictions; still, the genre calls for something that someone can read and digest fairly quickly.

Jay has no more empirical support for his position than I do for mine. We both have high hopes about particular sorts of changes. I have more confidence in teachers than he does (which makes Jay's closing "Power to the Teachers!" invocation seem contradictory). I taught HS English for 14 years, and knew a lot of great teachers (albeit in high-end schools). I've also been doing teacher education since 1990 and have prepared a ton more for the next generation. It's possible I'm working from a sampling error in that both universities I've taught in have been state namesake institutions (U. of Oklahoma, U. of Georgia) which tend to get the state's best prospects (there are few private universities in either state). But I still believe that teachers are smarter than they're given credit for. I also don't think that they're as unimaginative or acculturated to school-as-drudgework as Jay believes to the point where they can't think of things without someone higher up the food chain thinking of it first for them. 

At http://www.coe.uga.edu/~smago/vita/vitaweb.htm#OpEd I archive my op-eds, a genre I've been investing more time in the last few years because they reach more people, and reach people quickly from outside academia (one published in Sunday's Atlanta paper was online 5 minutes after I sent it to the editor--that's pretty fast, but it's a fast process). One of the themes that's emerged from the writing is that you have to make teaching an attractive profession in order to attract the brightest, most dynamic people available. In my view, moving to local control would promote a major change in culture that would attract and retain more smart and innovative people as teachers. Presently, the incentives for becoming a teacher are that you can administer tests and be blamed for the results. What sharp-as-a-tack person would want to spend 40 years doing that? Change the school culture, and you'd not only change the workforce but do so in productive ways. Or so my theory goes. I doubt if we'll see it put into practice until I raise my next $40 billion.

It's just not clear to me that teachers are as dull-witted as Jay presumes, such that they'd keep everything in place without thinking about it. Teachers have a ton to say about how schools operate if you hang around staffrooms for 5 minutes. It's just that nobody listens to them.

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Jay Lemke
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 8:59 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Centralized vs. Distributed decision-making in schools


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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