~synthesis~

The best-laid plans

Happy New Year!

I was just reading Pete Reilly's year-closing entry where he enumerates the mission statements of 11 New York State school districts and asks why the schools' actions don't more closely reflect them?

The first thing that came to my mind is this stanza from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse":

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Roughly and more mundanely, "Mousie - you're not alone; proving foresight may be vain, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and leave us nothing but grief and pain, where joy was once promised."

Parenthetically, it makes me wonder about the value of New Year's resolutions, and the mentality behind that concept. Why not always live as you wish you would, instead of waiting for an arbitrary day to commence change?

Getting back to Pete's question, I think it comes back to something I've harped on many a time (1, 2, 3). In a nutshell, we are what we measure.

We're ever-destined for grief and pain if in writing these beautiful and lofty and idealized mission statements, the goal is only poetry and not measured outcomes.

The cynic in me assumes that it was a bunch of marketing wonks (not unlike me) who crafted the mission statement in total isolation and then pitched it to the boss-person who looked at it as a marketing tool vs. a genuine and meaningful commitment. Poor leadership abounds.

The cynic would also read the next (and final) stanza in the poem:

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I see,
I guess an' fear!

No!

While this is really just another day in the Earth's journey around the Sun, it is one we mark with reflection and hope.

My reflection begins with the Chinese proverb: the times produce their heroes. Our unwitting (as true heroes are) heroes are our teachers, the necessity of our times has produced them. I am grateful to them for their unswerving passion and and commitment, and hope that the New Year and the new leadership will this time herald that much-promis'd joy.

Creating Greatness

I have quoted Wayne Gretzky many times over the last few months - I think his comment that good players skate to where the puck is, and great ones skate to where the puck will be is brilliant. Upon reflection though, I think he was being too humble.

Great players not only know where the puck will be, they know how to get there, and they know what to do when they meet the puck there. What's more, they're great no matter the rink, the ice conditions, or any other issues that pose challenges to mere mortal players. One more thing - they create winning.

I attended a roundtable recently that was aimed at improving STEM performance in a state school system. One of the conclusions that the "adults" in the room drew is that they need to be reaching students via Facebook and MySpace because that's where the kids are, and learning needs to reach them.

Given how our school systems work, it'll take years for this to take effect. Additionally, any solution like this will have to live for many years to be deemed worthwhile.

First, if adults know about it and use it, how soon will it be before kids abandon Facebook/MySpace due to severe lack of coolness? Second, even if it was still cool now, how likely is it that it will be cool then? Finally - just today Scott Herhold wrote about what could well be the beginning of the end for Facebook anyway.

The point? Simple - learning isn't about Facebook or an exam or an essay. It's about preparing every child for greatness. That means something different for each child. Greatness isn't about one path it's about any path. It's not about one discipline, and it's not only about any discipline, it's about the capacity to embrace disciplines as needed because the foundation is so strong.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, we need to teach timeless skills. But to do that well, we can't be tied to any approach, no matter how much that approach is heralded today as a panacea.

Our education system needs to be implicitly flexible, and teachers need to be taught that curriculum is an organic thing, just as their students are organic things. Assessments, measurements and incentives need to align to this. We must teach that which gives our children the capacity to know where the puck will be, the ability to get there, and the insight to know what to do when they reach it.

These principles should be foremost in the design of every educational system.

A Pound of Cure

Newsweek reported last week about the work Senator Tom Harkin is doing to focus the Presidential Transition Team's healthcare portfolio on preventative care and wellness. Bravo to him!

The United States spends $2 trillion (yep, "2" with 12 zeros!) annually on healthcare, more than any other nation on earth (according to the WHO). And yet the US ranks 37th among nations in citizen health, and 20th out of the 21 industrial nations.

Some reasons:

1. Americans are about the unhealthiest people in the world
2. Americans are horribly lazy and believe that pills can cure bad behavior
3. Physicians in this country are paranoid about lawsuits and over-test, over-prescribe, and over-treat
4. Pharmaceutical companies know how good a thing they've got
5. Insurance companies are mind-numbingly stupid
6. The policy and regulatory machine is embarrassingly out of touch

I'm thinking that #2-6 have caused #1.

Senator Harkin is right - something needs to be done. It's a combination of health-conscious behavior with appropriate incentives for the machine. It surprises me that insurance companies won't pay for preventative care, but will happily cover the result of bad behavior. How bizarre!

I'm sure the insurance companies realize that if people are healthy, they will still get premiums but won't in aggregate have to spend as much? Wouldn't it be better to spend a little bit on everyone (assuring preventative healthcare across the population), and then benefit from not having to spend so much on the vast percentage of the population that gets sick because of bad behavior?

It's similar to the drug problem in this country. We spend $billions on the so-called war on drugs in the name of being tough on crime (another ridiculous concept), but don't realize that if we spent those $ on reducing demand by helping and curing drug addiction, we'd end up starving the suppliers. All without having to put people in jail, and instead helping people eliminate their dependencies and lead better lives.

This is classic of a system that is not interested in cause and effect, but simply patching symptoms.

This is an endemic problem, ranging from failing bridges, levees and air traffic control systems, to starting wars without thought to how they'll end, to badly-designed school systems, to borrowing without considering financial capacity, to poor health, to crime, to everything.

Oddly the population of this country seems sanguine about all this. There's no sense of urgency about fixing any of this. Why is that?

I wrote a while ago about how breast cancer can be managed through early detection and about how we're presently governed by a stunningly short-sighted leadership. It feels like this society only lives in the present, and is completely oblivious to anything that might happen tomorrow as a result of indifferent or bad behavior today.

What does it take to open our minds to the reality that you can only paint over the cracks so many times before the walls fall down?

I think the first step is for this entire society to abandon the idea that there is a free lunch for weight-loss. This (yet another) multi-billion dollar industry preys on people that think there's a quick fix.

Let us once and for all recognize the fallacy of fried chicken, pork rinds, french fries with gravy, apple pie and a diet soda?

Pointless Competition

Eduwonk (Andy Rotherham) wrote about international pressures on American education recently. In it, he pointed to a press release by the National Governors Association, where they identified "five transformative steps that the American education system needs to undergo to produce more globally competitive students:"

1. Upgrade state standards by adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12;
2. Leverage states’ collective influence to ensure textbooks, digital media, curricula and assessments are aligned to internationally benchmarked standards and draw on lessons from high-performing nations;
3. Revise state policies for recruiting, preparing, developing and supporting teachers and school leaders to reflect the "human capital" practices of top-performing nations and states around the world;
4. Hold schools and systems accountable through monitoring, interventions and support to ensure consistently high performance, drawing upon international best practices; and
5. Measure state-level education performance globally by examining student achievement and attainment in an international context to ensure that students are receiving the education they need to compete in the 21st century economy.

These are good steps. Or are they?

The aim of America's education system should be to create the best possible American students, not the best possible African or Asian or European or Latin American students. This it seems will have us forever attempting to catch up to the rest of the world based on their standards. It's not as much about being globally-competitive as it is about being the best you can be.

Now I'm not arguing for xenophobic or myopic America-only thinking at all. I'm just saying that there are so many examples of excellence in American schools, why are we not basing our definition of great education based on these? There's one in my backyard - the Seattle Girls School. If the NGA was to look inside the America's borders they would find many successful schools; schools proven to understand this culture and this reality, and able to create greatness within it. At SGS, they focus more on creating an environment in which learning happens than curriculum. Where is the call for more research on this topic?

These schools' walls have the capacity to create great students. Perhaps the job should be to find ways to take Seattle Girls School and the hundreds of others like it to scale and achieve results that make the nations of the world seek to be compared to and measured by our standard?

Blame Game

Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed in the NY Times recently. He argues against demonizing the teachers' and auto workers' unions for all the problems facing these two industries.

He notes that Randi Weingarten (president of the American Federation of Teachers - AFT) and Ron Gettelfinger (president of the United Auto Workers - UAW) have both represented their unions/members as respectively willing to, and having made significant concessions to help out given these economic times.

The UAW has lowered starting wages for new employees. How does that lower the costs for the Big Three? They aren't hiring anyway - so what difference does this make?

Similarly, the AFT has agreed to change the way tenure is awarded (but not change the tenure of current teachers). They have gone further to allow changes to merit pay and teacher assignments, which is a positive step.

Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk also saw this article and commented that in his experience teachers are not perceived to be the cause of the failings in our education system. Similarly, I don't think auto workers are perceived as the cause of their industry's failings.

So why are they being vilified? Simple - the mission of both unions is to maximize the salaries and benefits of their employees with the most favorable working conditions to the employees. To their credit, the AFT does state in their mission statement the goal to "strengthen the institutions in which [they] work". The UAW does similarly talk about improving product quality.

But in addition to poor management and inappropriate measurements of performance and success (I've written about this often - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), there is no doubt that during negotiations between labor and management, neither side is worried about the success of their industry. They're respectively worried about getting the most for their members, and and spending the least amount of money on their employees.

In a successful negotiation, the primary goal is to sustainably produce the best results for our end customers. If both sides were genuinely committed to this goal, they would realize:

1. If we don't produce the best product, we won't stay in business for very long,
2. If the business isn't profitable, it won't be around even if we do make a great product, and
3. If our employees aren't treated well, paid well, and cared for as partners in our success, we won't be able to produce our product at all.

Success is not about extracting everything you can from management (as the UAW seems to believe), nor is it about stomping down the unions as Michelle Rhee seems to believe.

Winning is important, but at what price? This isn't about blaming one side over the other, it's about taking accountability for the end result, and understanding that every player in the game must succeed for the outcome to be sustainable.

21st Century Military - it's a dick thing

How to Pay for a 21st Century Military is the title of a recent editorial in the NY Times. It goes to great length to show where the Pentagon can focus its efforts to eliminate programs/investments that are superfluous in this no-longer-new century.

Before I'd start deciding what to cut, I'd ask myself what is the purpose of this whole organization in the first place? There are a four possibilities:

1. Ego - see below for a detailed scientific analysis
2. Inertia - well, it's been around for years, may as well keep going...
3. Offense - to project American power against other nations
4. Defense - to protect American soil from unwanted intrusions

#1 - Ego. Spike Lee wrote and directed a great film in 1990 called "Mo' Better Blues." The main character (a jazz trumpeter) played by Denzel Washington can't be loyal to one woman - why? Because "with men, it's a dick thing." <-- I'm guessing many women will view this as the reason for much if not all male behavior in this or any other century, but that's another conversation.

While unlikely, one has to hope that as a country that is ten (10) generations old, we'd by now have gotten to the point of not needing to stroke ourselves in this way (forgiving the pun)?

#2 - Inertia scares me just as much as Ego. If the machine has become so large and self-feeding that it can't stop despite having no direction or intent, then what do you do? It's very easy to resort to fear-based tactics (our current administration has proved this) and make people invest in this machine just because it's there, but we have to stop the madness.

While unlikely, one has to hope that our ten-generation-old country has gotten to the point of recognizing that size doesn't matter??  

#3 - Offense. What force does America need to project against the rest of the world? Does the United States have an interest in invading and occupying even more countries (besides Iraq and presumably Afghanistan) around the world? Everyone agrees that we should never be an occupying force in any situation (even Iraq), and especially not Afghanistan. So let's get out of that business. What's more, any offensive act should only be undertaken in concert with the United Nations as part of a global effort lead by the UN and not the US.

While unlikely, one has to hope that our almost-teenage (in generations) country has gotten over the idea that being a bully is sexy???

#4 - Defense. OK - there is no argument that this (of all) country needs to have the ability to defend itself, and protect it's borders from unwanted intrusions. While I can't imagine any country wanting to take on the burden of invading and governing the United States, I can absolutely see the value of a deterrent force that is not only able to protect this land, but also participate (as the National Guard) does in civil crises, and be a partner in international, UN-lead peace-keeping efforts.

While unlikely, one has to assume that an almost-adult country has the maturity to know that well-behaved but fun guests get invited to more parties???? 

I'm sure one argument that is foremost in the minds of the pro-big-military is the so-called war on terror.

OK - first, you can't have a war on terror, you're giving terrorists much more credence and oomph (a technical term) than they've earned. Terrorists are criminals. You don't fight wars against criminals, you use the police to arrest them.

Imagine if the US Army had been brought in to fight the Mafia during their heyday? It was rightly a job for the FBI.  This is different in that it also includes foreign locales, so it's the FBI + the CIA.

Using the military ends up involving the entire citizenry of each affected nation. Given the blunt instrument that is any military, you help the criminals recruit more people because of all the collateral damage - this is exactly what we don't need.

There is another weapon that can be used to combat terrorism, improve foreign relations, and even reduce the risk of wars. I wrote about a this a while back.

The recent crises have taught us that the economies of every country in the world are profoundly interconnected. If we can help every economy grow and prosper, the people will be too busy being healthy, educated and employed to worry about harming anyone.

That's the nirvana we should aspire to in the 21st century.

Leadership is about making tough decisions.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Secretary of Defense could dig deep (sorry) to find the cohones to put the country first, and agree that this century requires a fundamental redefining of the American military machine.

Willingly Misinformed

It snowed a whole lot here yesterday, which combined with this time of year and this article about the mortgage crisis in the New York Times put me in a reflective mood. Most interesting and telling - as recently as September 18 of this year, President Bush was unaware of the extent to which economic conditions had deteriorated, and had no idea how we got here!

Is this a freak occurrence or a pattern? Example situations (by no means comprehensive):

1. The events leading up to 9-11
2. The lack of preparation for Katrina
3. The performance of FEMA after Katrina
4. The lead-up to the Iraqi invasion
5. The military strategy for entering and exiting Iraq
6. The resulting oil crisis
7. Ethical failures in the White House, the Department of Justice (Gonzales), the Department of Defense (Veterans Hospitals, Boeing/Airbus tankers, etc.), to name just a few.
8. The financial crises
9. The reactions to the financial crises

But it's not just keeping an eye on the ball, it's also about situational hitting. What's your judgment of how this country has reacted to any of these issues? Here's my sense of the modus operandi:

1. Look only at the symptoms that jump out at you (WMD, one shoe bomb, liquids on planes, etc.)
2. Be blissfully naive about everything else, and use PR spin to get everyone to rally behind the one thing
3. Never forget to use fear, wield power (military might, financial might, etc.), think narrowly (to avoid the appearance of lying), and be thoughtlessly bold
4. Define the one thing as a matter of national security (or something like it), and force everyone to focus only on that
5. Once you've sold a plan of action, secured funding, abused enough rights and freedoms, and stroked all the egos, assume the problem will fix itself anyway, and we'll use PR to make us look good, like we worked feverishly and unwaveringly to do the right thing
6. If/when the narrow-minded strategy fails, we'll just use the next crisis to divert people's attention
7. Go back to #1

Then it occurred to me - how is this different from the way most American companies operate? Think of the Detroit Big Three. Think of the financial services sector. Think of the energy sector. Think of telecommunications, or entertainment, or education, or high tech, or whatever else.

Is this how America works? Surely not!

Maybe this is what happens when organizations (or societies, or whole countries) rise too quickly, get too accustomed to the idea that failure doesn't really happen, that winning today is critical, and that at the end of the day, PR and a good perception machine is all you need to make your case before an increasingly naive and ignorant public that blindly grasps at every straw.

Erasmus was right - "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."  We, it seems have forsaken wisdom for instant gratification, experience for expediency, and chosen misinformation over integrity.

If America is the Hare of the world, who is the Tortoise? That's a tough one. Why? "Hare-mentality" prevails across most of the larger, "successful" countries in the world. Most societies (Eastern and Western) are thus infected.

There are smaller (much smaller) countries out there that seem to have found their center, are able to consistently make good decisions, and have a more nurturing society that cares for its citizenry first, and doesn't seem bent on beating anyone, or imposing themselves on any other country. But then again, they're not actually in competition with the Hare are they?

These  nations seem pretty centered on their place in the global economy, and aren't aspiring to unseat any other society or nation. They are very self-aware and self-critical when things don't go well; they recognize situations, accept blame and work together to resolve and move on. They compete for things and not against organizations or people.

Hmmm... is that the real lesson? If you deal with integrity, take accountability, and are transparent in your actions and their results, then sustained success is possible?

A thoughtful (if that's possible) reaction from the Hares of the world might be that deliberateness stifles creativity, quantum change, and significant outcomes. A fair point.

Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Do we have any leaders that are that good?

Measure well

Seth Godin wrote today about how to live to fight another day. While our default is to question our customer's decision-making when the deal doesn't go our way, he argues that losing with grace gives you more chances to be invited back to the table. I agree.

So why is this not typical behavior? Simple - we are what we measure. Very few salespeople or sales organizations are measured on sustained performance (where "sustained" spans more than a quarter or a fiscal year). Therefore the sales team and each salesperson is goaled specifically on winning every deal, closing every opportunity, etc. Lifetime value means less than deal value.

I worked at IBM Canada in the early 90s. At a sales training class, the instructor argued that success is most dependent on the relationship you have with the customer. The measure of a great relationship is when your customer calls to tell you that he tried his best, but had to buy the competitor's product. However, he hopes that this doesn't tarnish your relationship in anyway! Wow!

This is one very clear reason for why IBM has been so consistently successful - they care so much about their customers, that their customers care just as much about them.

A purely commission-based sales force loses when they leave any money on the table. This is why they behave this way. You are what you measure.

So how does an organization measure sustained success? 

What if we made commissions the smallest part of the compensation package? What if the accelerators were based on the customers' success, our sustained performance over time, and customer satisfaction?

A very simplistic formula might look like this:

Compensation = [total revenue X 2% (sample base commission rate)] X [1 + customer's year-on-year revenue growth percentage] X [average attainment over the last three years from this account] X [three-year average customer satisfaction index]

Say the deal was worth $1mm, the customers' business had grown by 105%, the sales team had achieved 97%, 103% & 105% of quota the last three years, and their sat index was 90, 98 & 97%.

Then the sales person would receive: [$1mm x 2%] x [1 + 105%] X [ave (97, 103, 104)%] X [ave(90, 98, 97)%] = $20,000 X 205% X 104% X 95% = $40,508.

$20,000 turned into just over $40,000 based on the customer's success, sustained sales performance, and customer satisfaction.

Now imagine how the customer's view of the salesperson might change if they knew that commissions were based in large part on the customer's overall business success? Imagine how the salesperson's point of view would change?? The sales company benefits because their customers' loyalty will grow, which will result in lower costs of sales, higher margins, and more predictable revenues over time.

You are what you measure.

1:1 laptop programs?

Pierre de Vries found some interesting data that made me wonder about this. So I compared the data that Pierre referenced from the Economist to the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) data on student performance around the world (both are 2006 studies). 

There's no correlation between the two; some of the high performing countries have more computers per capita and some don't.

Many of the countries in the high-performing list aren't in the high-computer list. This is not based on a defensible statistical analysis, but if there isn't a correlation, then why are we all obsessed with adding more technology to the classroom?

The atoms that make up the molecule we call a great education don't seem to require a high percentage of tech. I wonder what the critical atoms are?

We know that a great teacher is the beginning, so that's number one. What's number two? Is it curriculum, assessments, parents, the environment (building, furniture, etc.), urban vs. rural, economic factors, genetics?

What?

Is there something else?

If this second critical factor is X, then is it something that we could use ICT to improve?

Is it something we could use public policy to improve?

Is it something we can use money to improve?

Or does this molecule depend on all these other ingredients in some measure, but at the end of the day, it's all about the teacher?

If that's true, then it pretty clearly points us to doing as much as we all are able to proliferate wonderful and brilliant teachers.

Is it as simple as that? Is this the one and only place we need to focus? If we as a society put all our attention and energy into creating better teachers, do we win? More importantly, do our children win?

If this is the panacea, then what is preventing us from doing what we need to? Is it the teachers' unions? Is it the intractability of teachers who teach the one year they know every year? Is it how standardized testing has polluted/forced the teacher to teach a certain way? Is it money? Is it how the school system in this country is organized (thousands of districts vs. a central mechanism)?  What?

Is this the one thing we need to solve to transform education everywhere?

Sometimes you just gotta say...

I may not be an educator, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Well, OK - so maybe I didn't, but that's not going to stop me:).

Rodd Lucier (awesome blog name The Clever Sheep) wrote last Thursday about a conference he attended on the use of tools (ostensibly ICT tools) to ensure learning is relevant to the students of this century. A great thing. While there, he overheard some interesting conversationlets:

"Our IT department won't let us!"
"My superintendent doesn't get it."
"We don't have enough money."
"Our computers are too old."
"The school networks are out of date."
"We still ban cell phones in school!"
"I've never even heard of RSS."
"The kids know more than we do."
"I don't have the time!"

Phooey! 

Every one of these statements is an excuse. How many of these same educators would accept these excuses from their students???

David Warlick was generous enough to offer his suggestions on how to overcome each of these objections. I think David went over and above on this. His ideas are great, but I believe giving their words this much credence may not be the best approach. From the season 7 opener of West Wing:

"If you don't like what they ask, don't accept the premise of the question."

Or in this case, don't accept the premise of the response. While I think David's responses are apt, I'm pretty convinced that he'd be tilting at windmills if he went to the authors of these excuses and offered to help. They would find other excuses. "That'll never work at my school," "my situation is different," "you just don't understand the people I have to deal with," or whatever. 

Here's what I might have said:

When I was growing up, one of the defining movies about taking control of your life, finding your power, and of course, getting the girl was Risky Business. It was ground breaking on many fronts, and there was this one quote that struck a chord:

'Every now and then say, "What the fuck." "What the fuck" gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future.'

These words should be tattooed on the foreheads of all the educators who made all those excuses that Rodd overheard so they can read them in the mirror every morning.

OK - so that might not set the right example for their students, but the principle is sound. Every great teacher I've ever met shares among others, the following traits: integrity, a passion for their students' success, a commitment to doing great things.

Saying the magical phrase above "gives you freedom, freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

Every one of the excuses above can be overcome with enough ...chutzpah to do what's needed to get to better learning outcomes. I went to a fantastic event celebrating Innovative Teachers a few weeks ago where I met many, many educators from around the world who exhibited this kind of strength and guts and ingenuity, and are getting results despite these and many other obstacles. 

In conversations with them, not one knew all the answers up-front, none had all the approvals or funding or resources to get it done once they found some answers or approaches. They undertook a process something like this:

1. Understand the real problem
2. Figure out what you know and what you have at hand
   
3. Do the gap analysis to know what you still need
4. Get help (from students, staff, faculty, the community, wherever)
5. Be creative and ingenious if funding is required
   
6. Give it a go
   
7. Evaluate and tweak
8. Return to Step 6 until it's good
   

Sometimes, you just gotta say... it "gives you freedom, freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future."

What's so 21st Century About it?

21st Century Learning/Skills are all the rage. But what's the 21st-centuryness of it all?

It seems that the only 21st century aspect (if you could even call it that) is the recognition that ICT is more present now than in say the 19th century. Well, dah... But so what? How many schools can really claim to educate a young person in this world about ICT? They might be able to teach them computer science (but that's not the same thing).

The most pervasive technology for younger people is mobile devices; but most schools' policies ban these devices! How are they going to claim any 21st centuryness if they ban technology usage in schools??

The skills required to find information and filter it; create insight based on knowledge gathered/gained; and then persuasively communicate these insights and point of view to others is a core set of skills common to any century. I wrote about this a while back, and coined a name that I think has legs - the Edutanic when talking about our current education system.

The late 20th and 21st century have, I think posed a greater challenge to educators and policy-makers. The Internet has taken away one source of power educators had (as historic gatekeepers to information); and modern communications has taken away any shelter the policy-makers had from vested parents. But for the students, its business as usual - why? Because they've grown up with it.

As I wrote in the Edutanic, when asked what made a hockey player great, Wayne Greztky said - "a good player skates to where the puck is, a great player skates to where the puck will be."

Our children should be taught within a system where that six-year-olds are entering, knows where the puck will be when they're 18, and teaches them those things that will be relevant at that time. That's our challenge. But it's very hard to successfully predict that, and building the dynamic teacher professional development machine it would take to teach our teachers appears impossible.  

So why not focus instead on preparing our children for any future and every future? It is these core fundamentals that will prevail in any time.

Let's replace 21st century skills with Timeless Skills. Imagine knowing that your children are going to school to develop themselves into adults that will be able to handle anything that comes their way. How would you feel about the world literally being their oyster?

The next Secretary of Education...

...should be someone unique. S/he must be a proven, successful educator combined with a successful manager of an education system.

I was reading Scott McLeod's recent blog entry on Alfie Kohn's essay in the Nation. It's excellent as usual and I totally agree with Scott.

There is a lot of media fervor around Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and Arne Duncan. They are among the front-runners for SOE, and appear to be opinionated, narrow-thinking, bureaucrats who in classic MBA fashion, are looking to inject even more mechanization into a machine that (due to NCLB, etc.) is already losing its soul at an alarming rate.

I have worked with MBAs. They are trained to be dispassionately metric-driven. Their focus is on achieving the specified result. Success is often only measured by reaching or exceeding the stated metric. It can result in leaving little room to assess whether their project contributes to or hinders the bigger picture, or whether it results in a sustainable outcome.

After a quick scan of their three leadership styles, it looks like Rhee, Klein & Duncan are all about immediate and noticeable impact ("ready, fire, aim"). And if they're anything like the DOJ was under Golzales (or Gonzaless?), I wonder how their attitudes will infect the rest of the organization?

The result (using the quote that opens Kohn's essay) might be an even more exacerbated version of this:

If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.   --Linda Darling-Hammond

Expeditiousness and the relentless pursuit of the result are all that matter.

The mantra for Rhee, Klein & Duncan looks to be improve standardized test results at the lowest cost. <-- This doesn't bode well for our children.

Though I suppose if I were their babysitter and couldn't find the kids, I'd know to check the closet.

I hope the next Secretary of Education:

• is inspired,
  
• is not just an MBA,
• can get things done at scale, 
• can sublimate their own ego for the greater good,
• is more focused on practical, sustainable, macro-outcomes, and
  
• can do all this while maintaining a sense of heart and love for our children and their destiny.

And let's also hope that they can, as Pete Reilly so eloquently put it, understand that "Your life is a reflection of you."

My vote is for Linda Darling-Hammond; if you agree, sign the petition supporting her selection.

Find the Joy

A good friend of mine used this phrase (find the joy) as his IM tag. He is a brilliant marketer. I think I now understand what he meant, but it took one other person and two other experiences to help me get there.

I recently attended a lecture by Tony Wagner who talked about, among other things, his seven survival skills for teens today (as expressed in his book The Global Achievement Gap). 

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Collaboration across Networks and Leading by Influence
3. Agility and Adaptability
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
   
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
7. Curiosity and Imagination

During the lecture, he asserted that these are the necessary ingredients to assure the success of a school in the 21st century. I was sitting next to a good friend Marja Brandon, who raised her hand to say that there was a missing ingredient - joy. She is the head of Seattle Girls School, and her school absolutely embraces these seven, but the ingredient that makes her school successful is #8 - Joy. The hallways, classrooms, the very fabric of the school must be steeped in joy, for this must the stuff of any place where our children spend time.

The second experience came today as I read Martin Lindstrom's article in Advertising Age entitled How Apple, Others Have Cultivated Religious Followings. In it, he talks about the nine ingredients required to create brand following: A Clear Vision, A Sense of Belonging, An Enemy, Sensory Appeal, Storytelling, Grandeur, Evangelism, Symbols, and Rituals.

Like Wagner, I think Lindstrom forgets that final ingredient of Joy. I own a lot of Apple gear, and I know that feeling of making my purchase at the Apple Store, or receiving a package at home, and further that feeling you get when you share the newest, coolest app that you just downloaded for your iPhone with a fellow-iPhoner. (It is enhanced when you sense the rest of the group's envy at not having that particular toy!)

Joy makes me return to the store, it is also what makes Marja's students run to school everyday.

My good friend was right with his IM tag - "find the joy" is fundamental, and Marja was right about her school. If you can find, capture, and sustain this feeling, you get to be successful. And what's more, to the outside world, it looks incredibly easy and natural; and your peers/competitors all look with envy because it is that ineffable thing that they simply don't know how to name or capture.

There is no doubt in my mind that finding and holding on to the joy is one of the most difficult things any person or organization will do.

It takes hard, hard work, a truly authentic commitment, and the integrity and savvy to recognize and respect it.

Long Tail Advertising

Mark Cuban wrote an excellent post a couple of days ago about the next iteration of Youtube. This quote was interesting:

"A look at the current Youtube home page demonstrates the new reality of user generated content. Everyone wants to get paid.  Rare is the widely viewed video that doesn’t have a profit or stardom motivation."

So what does this mean? I think it's about this concept of long tail advertising. I think these comments in the entry are onto something.

"...the short head will be human, the fat middle social, the long tail algorithmic."  "And he says that the advertising interest is in the fat tail."

I'm struggling to imagine a scenario where it ever makes sense to advertising to the fringe - especially in this era of long tailness.

What is the era of long tailness? We are in or approaching a place where search, social and community all work together to find birds of a feather and connect them. It's pretty clear that the farther down the tail you are, the easier it is to find your friends - the searches get that much more precise, and the communities are that much smaller and more specific.

So - if the farther down the tail you go, the more precisely the community can be defined, what's the point of advertising (which by definition is an imprecise, un-targeted tool for "spray" reach)?

So how does this connect back to Mark's blog? Well - I think the situation for Youtube is more dire than Mark thinks. On the assumption that his premise is true (i.e. most everyone who posts on Youtube has an ulterior motive - either revenue or notoriety), then how will they be gratified?? Having scanned some recent postings on Youtube (over the last hour), the majority are decidedly long tail, and very far away from interesting any large, "sprayable" demographic.

So why advertise to that audience via Youtube at all?? I think Mark's overestimating the willingness of advertisers to put $$ against these audiences. If I were in their shoes, I'd use alternate means to reach my audience, and what's more of the three I mentioned above (search, social and community), I'm going to find myself starting with search, but quickly moving to the other two, since at some point, they'll find me via social and community. I won't need to go looking for them.

And that's when I'll use a different form of advertising than the traditional Google model.

I wonder if we're beginning to approach the point at which what is a brilliant business model (Google's) starts the journey towards the way of the TV ad?

Edu-leadership

What is the right amount of money for a community to spend per student? How does one judge this? A number of studies [one, two, three, four] I looked at today that show contradictory information. Some say that the more you spend, the better the scores are, others say there is no correlation at all.

What's the right answer?

I wonder if we're asking the right question. Is it about the amount or is it about the composition of the investment and the mandate of those managing it? My gut says it's about the latter. My gut also says it's really about how we measure success and where accountability lies.

Today the decision-making rests in the hands of school districts, state and local politicians, heads of schools, and maybe parent-teacher organizations. The federal government also has a hand in this of course.

Three questions:

1. Who defines success?
   
2. Who judges whether success was achieved?
3. Who faces consequences of failure or gets credit for success?

Hmm... I'm not sure the answer to any of these questions is clear is it? Here are three more questions:

1. Who is the customer?
2. Who is the provider?
3. What mechanism is there for the customer to assert their market rights?

Perhaps the answers to these are more clear? Or are they? Is the customer the student, the taxpayer, or the federal government (who funds much of this on our behalf)? Is the provider the head of school, the school, the district, the teachers' union? Is there actually a clear flow of funds through which to assert market rights? Not clear, not clear, and no.

Going back to the first set of questions, you could say that all of society defines success, but this isn't practical, so it falls on legislators, but they'll come up with unfortunate programs like No Child Left Behind. Who judges success? Unclear. Who feels the consequences? Well that's interesting, as in the corporate world, it all flows downhill, so the lowest people on the ladder (teachers) feel the brunt of the pain; of course the students also feel it.

What to do? As with everything else, it's easier to find fault than fix things. From my experience in the corporate world, it almost always boils down to having one leader who has vision, strength, experience, but no ego. If this person is found, they will have the capacity to do what's hard (take a stand with conviction), and push for outcomes based on the best advice available. 

I believe we must know what the goal is and you are what you measure.

I wonder if we have it in us?

What's the Goal??

The education community is a-buzz. Everyone's up in arms about everything, from standardized testing, to unions, to compensation and incentives, to curriculum, to qualification, to public vs. charter or private, to reform, to whatever. It seems pretty clear that everyone has an opinion on what's wrong and great ideas on how to fix the system.

But in all of the content [Eduwonk Dan Brown @ Huffington, David Brooks, Eduwonk, Washington Post], I scanned on this topic in the last day, no-one's come up with a statement or definition or concept or suggestion for what success looks like.

This "Ready-Fire-Aim" approach isn't going to get anyone (least of all our children) anywhere. I'm reminded of Elton John's lyrics:

If we're all going somewhere let's get there soon
Oh this song's got no titles just words and a tune

This is what all this feels like - words and tunes, but no title - randomness.

My background is in Corporate America, and one thing I've learned in that world is that you can do a whole lot of intellectual masturbation, and while it might feel good, you're not getting things done. No outcome is created. And even if you do accidentally fall into an outcome, you have no capacity to judge whether it's good or bad!

What is the definition of success for education in America?

We all have a tendency to jump right into the solving part without first stating the outcome part. The definition of success should be simple, easy to understand, clearly measurable, and objective (i.e. the system can not be self-fulfilling).

I have written quite a bit about this, but think these two entries - You are what you measure and To boldly go where we MUST... capture the gist.

Scoping this to Kindergarten --> Grade 12 (K-12), I see the definition as:

1. 100% Student Success - measured by every child, irrespective of economic status, disability, gender, race, etc. successfully graduating.
   
2. Academic Capacity - measured by the graduates' performance in tertiary education.
   
3. Life Capacity - measured by the graduates' ability to be economically self-sustaining two years after graduation. 

In order. It is the job of the school to help every individual child who enters the system successfully complete their journey, not vice versa. The schools performance in teaching is judged by how its graduates perform in their next academic stage (university, college, etc.) compared to other schools. For those that don't choose an academic next stage, it is the schools job to prepare that student for success in the workforce, measured by their ability to earn a family wage. For more detail.
 
This is where the debate should begin.

A Gift Horse

Are the big three CEOs smarter than we think? Or are we giving them too much credit?

First they flew to DC in their private jets. Then they asked for $25 billion without knowing what they'd do with it. Then a month later they drove down in their hybrid cars and have now asked for $34 billion - that's a 36% increase in a month (or 432% annualized). But at least they came with a plan (albeit one that is complete speculation and stunningly optimistic by any pragmatic expectation of competence - really a bad work of fiction).

Damned impressive.

So - either these three CEOs of the hallmarks of the American manufacturing sector are really just this stupid, or they're much smarter than we are. In the naive hope that this is the latter, here's a possible scenario:

All three CEOs got together at their weekly pinochle game with Aunt Mildred last summer, and realized that the ripple effect of the impending foreclosure problem was sure to hit their business, and when it did, it would, well, screw them.

While drinking sherry, they commented, that if that wasn't enough, they were each being killed by their ridiculously shortsighted deal with the UAW (United Auto Workers) where GM (just GM)'s healthcare and pension obligation in 2005 was $5.6 billion!! That on top of a debt obligation that year of $300 billion!!

Makes one wonder just what the recruiting criteria are for the CEO of one of these companies, but that's the topic of another conversation.

On their second glass of sherry, their conversation ambled on to the fact that, well, their stocks were in the crapper (no further risk to their stock options at this point) anyway; if their sales dropped to zero, what would happen? Bankruptcy.

Is that bad? Well, first, it would allow them to nuke their dealer contracts - what a great thing! And... oooh! What about nuking their entire UAW employment contract? The pensions, legacy stuff, etc. - Wow!  Could they really do that [pour third glass of sherry] ...quickly each calls their employment lawyers - hmm... it's possible!! Yay! [Picture three old men, doing ring-around-the-rosie, in their cardigans and hush puppies.]

But wait - there's a "third" - they could even nuke a bunch of poorly-performing lines (or even brands) and because they were in Chapter 11, not face the ramifications!

Wow!!

But then... Aunt Mildred goes - I bet you guys'll get your butts sued by the UAW, the dealers, and anyone else with a pulse. "Uh oh."  Talk about a downer - where's the sherry bottle??

What to do? Well - if we look like we tried really hard, but screwed it up because we're actually that stupid - do you think that would work?

[Present-day] "Well - do you think it was bad enough?" "Where's the sherry?"

Dubious Legacy

As the tenure of the current most powerful person on the planet comes to an end, many have reflected on his time in office, and contemplated ways to appropriately commemorate this unique period in American history.

On the assumption that "Dubya" was not one of those children left behind, or that it is his intention to learn how to read (or at least properly pronounce "nuclear") once he officially retires, we can assume that he will build a library (albeit with books that don't use more than two-syllable-words).

Here therefore is my suggestion for how the George W. Bush Presidential Library should be organized:

•  9-11
• Alienation of foreign governments and peoples
• Blatant disregard for human rights
  
• Culture of predatory fear
• Dick Cheney (see also "Evil Incarnate")
  
• Egregious abuse of Presidential powers
• FEMA
• Gonzales, Alberto
  
• Historic deficits and national debt
• Inflation, recession, foreclosure, bankruptcy 
• Judicial appointments
  
• Katrina
• Lies (see also "WMD" & Libby, Scooter)
  
• Massive and inept government
• Nucular (see also No Child Left Behind)
  
• Oil & Gas tax breaks
  
• Plame, Valerie
  
• Quail hunting with Dick
  
• Rampant executive and ministerial corruption
• Shameless flaunting of civil liberties
• Total social & global embarrassment 
• Undermining global warming prevention
  
• Victory declared in Iraq (2/5/03)
  
• Wars on everything and everyone
• Xenophobe
• Yucca Mountain nuclear dump
  
• Zealot - religious bigotry 

Mr. President, in the immortal words of Monty Python, "I fart in your general direction!"

Insanity Defined

According to Einstein, it's doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Is the American Education system insane?

According to Lou Gerstner's editorial in the Wall Street Journal, it would seem so.  He suggests very dramatic change. I don't agree with everything he wrote, but I also don't think he went far enough; more about that in a minute.

But many don't agree with him at all. Joanne Jacobs feels that it's "nationalization," which hasn't succeeded. Case in point: Hawaii, with a single, state-wide school board that has apparently not done well. Deborah Meier at Bridging Differences suggests that we can't trust the federal government to raise our children, that Gerstner's approach would eliminate the parents from the equation, and they MUST be involved. Many others (including those who commented in Joanne and Deb's blogs) oppose Lou's proposal, some of these people have pretty solid educational backgrounds, so their views should be heard and considered credible.

I'm not an educator, but I'm not talking about learning. I'm writing about education systems - that's something very few educators have experience with - they're great in the classroom, no doubt; but how many have successfully created or run large-scale systems?

Going back to the definition of insanity - we've been attempting to reform this system for decades to no avail. In fact, the performance of the American education system is declining. I wrote about this here and here. What's more, there is a huge disparity in the performance of the states in educating their students. Unless we believe in the absurd notion that students are dumber in one state vs. another, the disparity is due to the poor performance of the education systems in that state, which means that there is no equality of education in this country. Why persist in repeating our failures? Change, dramatic change is needed. 

Some suggest we need to include the parents in this process - why? What qualifies them to operate an educational system? (Please don't get me wrong, I totally believe that schools exist to educate, and parents exist to raise their children.) But that has nothing to do with building the best possible education system for the country's children.

The current system is based on an Industrial Revolution mentality, where students are widgets (all the same) and the system's job is to turn them into widgets that can pass an exam <-- this can't be right? The beacon of the Industrial Revolution, the American automobile industry is failing, in large part because it persists in being tied to it's legacy (people, process and management), and attempting to build a product that is 25 years behind the times. It is being eclipsed by automobile manufacturing systems from other countries that have evolved and don't have these problems at all, they're successful.

Does this sound familiar?

Why would anyone in their right mind want to help our education system follow the path of the US automobile industry? This is what all the status-quo people are saying. I say no. We must also jettison current views of assessment, teacher tenure, old curriculum, arcane administrative machines, NCLB, etc.

Back to Gerstner, he is wrong about assessments - standardized testing is a proven failure, why use that as the basis for measuring performance? We need to go beyond this - the measures need to be about preparing our students for life beyond the given school and should be objectively measured on that basis. He's also wrong about creating 70 separate school districts. That's 69 too many. I think we need to create one K-12 Education System for this country that is measured in three ways:

1. 100% student success rate - every child must graduate.
2. The performance a school's graduates in tertiary (university, college, etc.) systems - this measure is relative to every other school. Since it is not controlled by the K-12 Education System, it is that much more objective.
3. The capacity (and reality) of a school's graduates that didn't choose tertiary education to earn a family wage within two years of graduation.

These are not measures the K-12 Education System can rig. Plus, these are also ways to measure each individual school's performance.

I don't argue for individual teacher-assessments, but rather aggregated school assessments. There's a lot of debate on how to reward the best teachers. That's a separate topic.

I do believe that the success of a student within the school is based on the overall quality of the school vs. any one teacher, and that's why I think there should be pressure on every teacher to help their peers be great so that the school as a whole is great.

I think we need one national system, it needs to focus solely on K-12, and it needs to be accountable as above. Further, it should embrace the brilliance and creativity of schools like Seattle Girls School, among others.

There is much more to be written on this.

Rating the Raters

I just saw this fascinating explanation of CDOs by Marketplace's senior editor, Paddy Hirsch. Until I saw this, I didn't realize that the poorly-rated elements of these instruments had become re-collateralized or maybe the better word is re-derivativized.

When a banker created the original security (S), s/he put together a package of mortgages and other debt that bear interest, and sold the package to investors, who purchased based on the risk they were seeking to undertake (let's call their choices: Saaa, Saa, Sbbb, Sbb, etc.). A second banker then created a derivative instrument (BS) based on (S), but instead of mortgages, this banker used the actual investments the first banker sold as the underlying asset.  What's more banker#2 used the higher-risk bits of Sx, so (BS) is based on a bunch of Sbbb, Sbb-type investments vs. any debt instruments,and vs. Saaa or Saa. 

With (S), people get paid in the following order (Saaa, Sss, Sbbb, etc.). The first people to get paid are (Saaa), but they get paid less as a percentage since they made a lower risk (and hence lower return) choice, but they get paid first. With (BS), the first people to get paid with (BS) are those that got paid last for (S).

Now here's the kicker. A rating agency rated BS investments as having the same risk profile as S!! Can you believe that??

Implication: people that bought BS got screwed.

How is it that the rating agencies have not been held accountable for this failure? Where is the Senate or House inquiry on these agencies' leaders?

It eludes me how simple accountability is abjectly ignored in our government.

When I wrote about this, I proposed a solution to the lending crisis. My idea was based on a purely market-economy-driven approach. I think if this approach were taken, while some of the Sx's and BSx's would have gotten a bit less money, most if not all of them would at least be paid for the simple reason that their interest payments would have resumed (albeit at a slightly lower level) very quickly. More critically, most homeowners would have been able to remain in their homes, continued to pay down their mortgages, and the banks and others in the financial system would have taken a bit of a hit but survived.

It's a simple idea, but it doesn't seem that simplicity is a preferred path.