Making great time on a lost highway.

Yogi Berra once said, "We may be lost, but we're making great time!" At least I think he said that because he also once said, "I didn't really say everything I said." Of course, Yogi was lost because he is a male and everyone knows we never stop to ask for directions. As I considered the idea of making great time while being lost, I naturally started thinking about school reform in this country.

For nearly 20 years we have waded around in the swamp of school reform, fixing schools that aren't broken and leveraging change that is not necessary. Now, before all the true believers of the current reform movement accuse me of being a "status quo educrat" willing to leave children behind, I will freely admit much needs to be done to make our schools places where all children can succeed. Yet I think the standards-based, test-and-punish, accountability and competition-at-all-cost models of reform are at best wrongheaded and at worst destructive.

It's quite simple. Current educational reforms are based on a misguided, mechanistic view of the world. This view rests on the Descartian belief that the universe is like a clock where if you change a few parts, you can make it tell better time. A mechanistic approach assumes that by fixing pieces, you can fix the whole and that by leveraging elements, you can move the totality to a different place. (Descartes has been upgraded to assume you can punish people into performance.)

Complex Connections

My view of the universe and organizations is more organic in nature; I see these worlds as interconnected and this quality defies easy fixes. You can't fix organisms; you must heal them. Most school leaders readily understand the interrelated qualities of organizations. We notice that when we change one variable in our system, 10 others are affected almost immediately. We think we are changing our sex education curriculum, but we are really electing your next school board. We may think we are closing schools to reduce the budget, but we are really determining the length of our next contract. Everything is connected to everything else.

H.L. Mencken once said, "For every complex problem there is a simple solution and it is wrong." With this in mind, why do we think we can mount simple answers to complex problems or believe that all that's required is to change one thing (even if it is an improvement), and everything else will change? This thinking is the polar opposite of chaos theory. In this version, if you put one thing in order, the rest of the universe will snap to and get in line. I don't think so.

What the proponents of the mechanical view of reform have never understood is that those of us fighting it don't do so because we think there should be no standards or accountability or even competition under the right circumstances. It is because we believe these things are woefully inadequate to make the system better. You can't stop leaving children behind merely by testing them and then putting their schools up to ridicule for poor performance. You can't improve education by setting standards unless you are willing to provide the support necessary for meeting the standards. You have to make sure the children are healthy and nourished and exposed to good teachers while providing them with the right materials and curriculum.

We also understand that you can't beat people into excellence. You don't inspire people by yelling at them.

Mechanical fixes are easy--and ineffective. Organic solutions are hard, but ultimately they are only way to improve schools. So while we are making good time on creating a system of mechanical fixes, we are lost in the space of an organic universe.

Awkward Explanation

One of my worries as someone who must explain why superintendents do what they do is that I have to explain why so many school leaders have jumped on the mechanical bandwagon. Aside from the fact that we are all people who want to please, I think the answer lies in the metaphor of lenses. We all start with our lens aimed at the mid-range of viewing. When you are responsible for making things better, you naturally tend to zoom in to find and create solutions. That blinds you to the broader vision of things.

The only solution is to pull the lens back to look long range, to look at the world in wide screen. Only then will you see how what you are getting ready to fix can make one thing better and make a dozen others worse. It will allow you to see the connected nature of things and to resist the simple and wrong answers.

Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." We can't measure imagination. We must create interconnected systems of answers to recognize that everything that counts can't be counted. We must acknowledge there is more to education than data and scores and that simple answers to complex problems will help us make great time as we roar down the lost highway.

*** Paul Houston is AASA executive director. E-mail: [e-mail]