00726 Public Education Opinion and Governance Response

A recent poll by Gallup and Phi Delta Kappa pried into the minds of the American people to determine their opinions on American schools.  The results:

Teaching was the top priority, well above standards, testing and fixing the worst schools.

Support is high for charter schools.

Don’t fire principals and teachers or close failing schools, just provide comprehensive support.

College education is absolutely necessary.

Funding is the biggest problem.

State, not Federal, government is responsible for public schools.

Teacher pay should be aligned with student achievement.

Teacher time to learn new and better methods is essential.

Increasing student motivation by paying students money is opposed.

The “grades” respondents gave their schools have been stable for 35 years.

Our governance leaders at all levels are supposed to reflect the wishes of the American people. So what have they focused on for American’s 55 million K12 students, 3 million teachers and 100,000 schools for the past couple of decades?

Standards, testing and trying to fix the worst schools, a host of new federal mandates and a single innovation – charter schools.

What did they not address in any substantial way?

Teacher (pay, education, professional development, practice, placement, support), funding (regulations, levels, and sources), student motivation (success, individualization)

If you will put up with my engineer-entrepreneur bias I will have a go at the mismatch of citizen opinion and leader action:

Our governance leaders are actually pretty smart. Although ideology varies there is an overriding realism in their decision making that keeps them from putting major investments into unproven areas. Standards and testing cost almost nothing (a few $million). They closed only a few of the failing Arizona school (a few more $millions). Hundreds of charter schools are supported since the teaching results compare to District schools and cost is usually less. Charter schools also provide a venue for innovation.

Aggressively improving the current legacy pedagogy within the teacher and student relationship carries risk. No other state has done it. The increased annual investment would be significant about $2 billion a year for Arizona. At best the results would be only a modest increase in academic performance.

The alternative way to address the opinions of the American and Arizona people is to break from the 19^th century legacy system and embrace the 21^st century means and methods.   More to follow….

00531 Ambiguous Decisions

Being an engineer, entrepreneur, designer and strategic planner, I have long been an advocate of integration of the rational, intuitive, creative and visionary aspects of decision making. This quartet seems to have served me well for most challenges over the decades. The one challenge that seems to be intractable to this approach is the transformation of K12 education to meet the needs and expectations of the 21^st century. Many of our eSATS task team have been working on this issue for 20 years – some for 30, and at best the solution has reached the 5% level.

Last week, I had a heated discussion on this issue with my close circle of high-tech entrepreneurial buddies from the 1980’s. They recommended that I abandon this grand challenge and like an entrepreneur, refocus on something that has a reasonable probability for success. I retorted that I had done the smaller summits, and Mt. Everest is the only game worth playing.

But it got me thinking that maybe my quartet of decision making processes was not hacking it. Perhaps what was needed was a new approach that would be effective with our target audiences – Arizona’s governance and education leadership. In reality, it’s their decision process, not mine that is fundamental to this K-12 transformation.

For incumbent leadership, the solving of this education challenge has been disappointing and potential solutions ambiguous. For 30 years they have responded with reforms that have face validity but have had minor effect on the overall challenge a 30% failure rate for student

graduation. Gary Klein, a psychologist and chief scientist at Applied Research Associates, has written a book on how people make decisions in ambiguous situations.*

From an interview in Science News, Gary Klein describes how we are wired for speed and it is impossible to not jump to conclusions in ambiguous situations. Within an unending universe of rules and facts, the logical risk analysis approach leads to inaction, or worse, to inaccurate and deceptive calculations that lead to disaster – like our financial crisis. Experienced decision makers use tacit knowledge to recognize situations based on experience. They create a mental story to understand what is going on while using intuition to make their decision.

Education is the most critical factor in the success of each citizen and for the entire State of Arizona. Leadership is rightfully hesitant to risk a radial change in the status quo without being assured of the outcome. But without a radial and successful change, we will continue our slow economic decline and wastage of 30% of our children. What to do?

I say we trust our decades old intuitively reinforced concept that technology is the key to transforming K-12 education and follow Gary Klein’s advice, “Successful decision makers actively manage a situation and shape their options rather than passively awaiting the outcome of a gamble that has specific probabilities, risks and benefits.”

In other words don’t analyze, synthesize or shade your eyes. Act now knowing that once eLearning  transformation has started your intuitions will serve you well in the follow through to a successful conclusion.

*Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, MIT Press, 2009.

00524 Refocus on Fundimental Arizona Needs

The May 21^st issue of Capital Times focused on Arizona’s recently completed legislative session. A section by Jeremy Duda was titled, “10 most significant bills of 2010.” The selection of items for any top ten list is highly subjective. But from a news criterion, which reflects the interest of readers, they have a tale to tell.

The article starts with S1070 the immigration bill followed by bills that;

Ban K-12 courses than focus on racial divisiveness or anti-U.S. sentiment;

Decriminalizes discreet gun carry without a permit;

Remove regulations for gun manufacturers that sell inside Arizona;

Joins Arizona with 18 other states in a lawsuit against the U.S. health care bill;

Requires reporting of corporations and unions on campaign spending;

Legalizes sale of small consumer fireworks;

Criminalizes as a misdemeanor offense the sending of sexually explicit photos by minors electronically;

Allows for private firms and other entities to operate State parks;

Increases to $1000 the amount for private education that can be deducted from state taxes.

We each have intuitive and emotional responses to these widely varying bills. That is why they make the top ten for news. But not one of them has any significant current or long range effect on solving the most important of Arizona problems:

Education that prepares less than half our children for success;

Workforce that is both rife with unemployment and is ill equipped to compete for quality jobs;

Economy that is not only struggling within a recession but has limited capability to transform from its 20^th century industries into the emerging industries of the 21^st century.

Bills that directly effected Arizona’s major problems were lost or killed in the chaos of sine die. The digital content/curriculum bill and the jobs bill were two that could have had a real effect.

It all comes down to a couple of questions. Will Arizona elect a legislature and a governor that will fade ideology and the news worthy moments into the back ground? Will Arizona’s newly elected 91 person governance focus 80% of their efforts on education, workforce and economy using a mid to long range outlook with deep intellect, rational thinking, prescient intuition and brilliant ideas?

We must make it so.