talent pools

If more money doesn't ensure a better education, what does?

A few days ago, J.R. sent me a link to an excellent presentation by Sir Ken Robinson about how today's schools kill creativity. J.R. also shared a recent post by Peter Bregman which advocates that you aren't pushing hard enough if your path to success isn't marked with failures. Then Kay (20 year public education veteran) sent me an email that illuminated a dynamic in education and health care that I had not considered before:

Quality

Prior to the 1960s, the American workforce excluded more people than it included, cutting off access to a huge, talent-laden pool of workers. During this time, most women were limited to three professions - nursing, teaching and administrative work. Thus limited, fully half our population's best and brightest devoted their energy and passion to these three fields. Is it any wonder that wellness improved, schools (and students) in this country were among the best in the world, and companies were well-run?

Imagine that - society actually benefited from discrimination. How ironic!

Since there were more candidates than jobs, employers could hire the cream of the crop at "competitive" rates. Again - how lucky for education, health care, etc.!

Things changed in the 1960s - attitudes began to shift and opportunities began to grow. When presented with alternatives, once again the most talented of this community left their present and moved on to their future; this time to the detriment of education, health care, and business administration.

Creativity

Like most people, I believe that teachers are the most critical factor in student success.

Standardized curriculum/testing, prioritizing literacy and numeracy, and a lot of the challenges that Sir Ken identified have been around a long time, but until recently the teachers were so good, they overcame these issues and the students learned regardless. What's more, because of their confidence and ability, teachers were also comfortable pushing limits, allowing their students to push limits, and together achieve great learning, knowing that mistakes and failures pave the way to insight.

In essence, the system wasn't great prior to the 1960s, but our successes happened in spite of this, and only because the teachers were good enough to overcome their environment. The proof of this is that there are brilliant classrooms and (in very few cases) schools today, but these teachers are very much in the minority among their peers.

If you build it...

If you ask a bureaucrat, he'll say we need to recruit back all these great teachers at an incremental cost of $billions. But it is rare in a large system (education, health care, mega-corporations, etc.) that adding more money creates better results. We need a different approach:

We must begin by ensuring that the outcomes of learning (the "what") are clear and explicit. But we leave it up to the teachers to determine how to accomplish these goals. We do this by federalizing (thus erasing a massively redundant bureaucracy), and eliminating the need for unions (who are generally resistant to change). By giving teachers and schools ownership over the "how", we can eliminate even more bureaucrats, and make the gig that much more attractive. The result (despite increasing teacher salaries) should be a significant reduction in the education budget, and a more appealing place to work.

We attract great people by recognizing that teaching is not a job, but a profession. We acknowledge that professionals seek the creative and intellectual freedom to do great things and make powerful differences.

We can make teaching a real destination, one that draws in the best of our society by giving them the room to grow.