~synthesis~

why?

How often do you ask this? More importantly, how often did you ask this? Wondering and asking "why" is a powerful determinant of creativity. Ironically, it's something we "breed" out of our children when they're young. I think it's mostly because adults get tired of being asked it at home, and when they're in school, it's because teachers (also adults I suppose) are also tired of being asked.

Sir Ken Robinson (if you haven't seen him speak, click on the image to the right; if you have seen it, click anyway - I've watched it at least 4-5 times) defines creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value." He argues that creativity should be as important in schools as literacy.

Sir Ken further argues (I couldn't agree more) that our schools in their ever-mechanical approach actually extract creativity from our children because of the way they measure "achievement," how they "enforce" discipline and adherence to structure, and worst how the "wrong" answer or approach is so actively discouraged as to impede the emergence of anything but a bland, conformist child. "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

Newsweek published The Creativity Crisis this month, where among other things, they talk about the correlation between a student's score on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and their "success" in life (entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers).

I've written here and here about how the values and needs of the industrial revolution have polluted the idea of a public education being about helping every child achieve their greatest self. As I stated during a recent interview on edReformer: "It feels like Education America has become an end unto itself – i.e. the system is less about whether children graduate prepared for the world vs. whether they went through the process of going to the school. The former is righteous, the latter smacks of too many administrators and mid-level bureaucrats getting in the way of people with a legitimate desire to help our children be the best they can be."

Voices like that of Sir Ken, and Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (authors of the Newsweek article) are important, but not enough if the goal is to reshape Education America or any other country's system.

The most critical voices are parents and employers. The former because they are (or are supposed to be) their children's advocates, and because they are voters and hence valuable to elected officials. The latter because they are the "reason" that education exists in the mind of most people/parents (to prepare kids to earn money). In effect, the employer has the real power, and the parent is one of the strongest advocates of their needs.

If employers don't want creativity, parents won't demand it in the classroom. If employers stopped hiring graduates of school factories, parents would take action. I had dinner this weekend with two very cool people who work for an education foundation, and we were talking about how difficult it is to affect real change.

What if instead of trying to change teachers or drive common standards or curriculum, etc., these foundations went straight to employers to "help" them become stronger advocates for better job candidates? What if they were able to get these employers eliminate the requirement for an accreditation to get a job? What if they were willing to put a bit more energy into the recruitment and filtering process, but focus on the person and their ability vs. what some piece of paper said they could do?

What if the foundation in question invested in a service that helped candidates better represent their true capabilities and not just what the transcript said? Imagine how by building a whole new way of marrying candidates to employers, a foundation with a relatively small investment could create fundamental change in the education system without ever touching it. Now imagine how parents would glom on to this and push their children, and their children's schools to make sure they were prepared for this new world.

Creativity requires that you be prepared to be wrong; if we're not willing to try new approaches, we will forever live up to Einstein's definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

culling the herd

According to the Census Bureau, in 2008, Education America (public primary/secondary) spent $593 billion, of which $582 billion was revenue-based, and $11 billion was borrowed. Of the revenue, 48.3% was local, 43.7% State, and 8% Federal.

<ASIDE>This represents $10,259 per pupil, which means that from K-12 and assuming the costs don't change too much, the state will spend $133K per child during their 13 years in school. If offered, I wonder how many parents would just take the money and leave their child in the dust?

One of the biggest casualties of the recent economic crisis is of course real estate prices; close behind are consumer spending and individual and corporate income (and hence income tax). The first is the biggest contributor to local revenue, and the latter two are the biggest contributors to state revenue. None of the three is forecast to return to pre-recession levels anytime soon, which means that the source of more than 90% of Education America's funding is at risk of being much less generous for the foreseeable future.

Since salaries and benefits are the largest chunk of education budgets, the states and districts are looking to nuke jobs. According to a recent Newsweek article, unions require that they respect tenure in this process, which means that urban/underserved students are the worst-affected, as younger teachers (with less/no tenure) tend to work in those schools.

The effect of the budget cuts is therefore a greater division between the haves and have-nots.

There are so many things wrong with this picture, I don't know where to begin. Education is often an early target for cuts because it doesn't directly affect voters. No-one pays attention to the fact that this is the surest way to perpetuate bad economic times and an increased future reliance on assistive public services (welfare, unemployment insurance, the whole legal system, supported healthcare, etc.), and hence a heavier burden on state and local budgets.

Paul Guppy of the Washington [State] Policy Center published an article last month that is worth a read:

• Student populations in Seattle and Spokane have declined over the last 30 years while adjusted education spending has doubled.
• Despite increased funding, almost 1/3 (half when looking just at minority students) of public school students drop out.
• Only 59 cents out of every dollar goes into the classroom!
• Average teacher pay (with benefits) in Spokane for example is $81k for a 10-month year; administrators in Spokane earn $107.670 in salary and benefits.
• Washington State has 101,700 public school employees, but less than half are teachers!

I'm guessing Washington State is not unique, that these data would be similar anywhere in the USA. A couple of things surprised me: teacher pay isn't horrible, but administrator pay is so much higher (though I suspect that's a full-year vs. 10 months); less than 60% of the budget goes towards the classroom; and more than half the employees are NOT teachers.

BUT - when you hear about layoffs, more often than not, it's the teachers getting nuked - hardly surprising given that the administrators manage budgets and hiring/firing.

So what to do? First there are 14,866 school districts in the United States, about 300 of which are in Washington State. Each district has its own administrative and operations machine, curriculum system, fund raising system, unions (both teacher and public service employees), and goodness knows what other redundancies.

I know that the Constitution (by omission) gives the States power over education, but why does Washington State have to have almost 300 districts? There's nothing in the Constitution that says that education must be that local? Maybe this was reasonable back in the horse & buggy days (literally), but surely modern roads and communications have obviated the need for that level of localness? Why not just have one district? Surely that's better for Washington students?

The 2008 Education budget for Washington State was $11.6 billion, and 66.2% or $7.7 billion was for wages and benefits. Since we know that there are more administrators than teachers, and that teachers get paid less than administrators, we can safely assume that more than half the payroll $$ go to administrators; let's call it half ($3.85 billion) for the sake of argument. Now let's say we are able to consolidate 300 districts into 1, and that that results in a 50% reduction in administrative staff (It should be higher, but...).

The result? The 2008 budget goes from $11.6 to $9.7 billion, saving $1.9 billion. Even better, there would be one consistent education system across the state, sharing curriculum, process, policy, etc.; and of course one consistent student experience.

Extrapolate this to the whole country (with the same assumptions), the budget would go from $593 - $492 billion, a savings of $101 billion, and we would have 50 school districts instead of 14,866.

This isn't innovation, simply process improvement. It does not require a Constitutional amendment. It simply requires that every state receive some percentage of local taxes (real estate), but in the end spend less money.

I would NOT suggest the savings go back into education - we should instead pay down the state deficits.

If we wanted innovation, I would put together a small (10 people) think tank, lock them in a room for three months, and task them with the following:

1. Design a primary/secondary education system where every child's success is assured, and where each child is treated equitably.
2. Prepare every graduate so that they are equipped to deal with an ever-changing future.

3. Do this with a budget of $2,500 per student per year, growing at the inflation rate.

I'd like to believe they'd emerge three months later with a plan, and also be able to say, "With the budget you gave us, we'll be able to set aside $500/student/year as a fund to cover us in tough times."

In today's world the 14,866:50 consolidation is political suicide, and the think tank's heresy. So why not do one and then the other?

expectations

Does a customer have a right to be served? Is there a law that requires every customer to be catered to? Does that law make sense?

It's true that there have been occasions in history where people were not served [see picture on the left] because of some kind of visible difference. It also happens today, case in point being this eight (yes, 8) year old girl, Evelyn Towry, who was arrested and handcuffed by the Boise police department at the request of her school principal because of her autistic behavior and I suppose they (full grown adults) felt physically threatened by her (yes, 8).

But I don't think the law makes sense. The existence of anti-discrimination laws doesn't always create the right outcome. In both cases not only were the perpetrators evil and wrong, but law enforcement was as well! Exactly what protection did the victims get? When we have too many rules, it becomes too difficult to enforce any of them, and the level of specificity creates too many loopholes, allowing fundamental wrong-doing to be forgiven.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not agreeing with the jerks that denied service to black people, or abused a poor eight-year-old child. Both parties should have been/be severely punished. In my opinion, people (white and black) should have boycotted the former's restaurant, and the latter all need to be terminated - the teachers, staff, principal and police officers should all be out on the street (and ideally not allowed to ever procreate again, but I suppose some might consider that harsh).

When does it make sense to exclude a customer? Seth Godin wrote about a failure heirarchy (I like this idea a lot) - it argues that you have to live up to your intentions and expectations, and that failure is critical to success. Part of this license to fail comes from choosing the right customers.

Roger Kay claims that Apple is firing its customers and that that's wrong. His view is that Apple should be much less exclusive in its dealings and be open to all types of customers. I don't agree.

When you build a product (say an item of clothing, you "optimize" it for a certain gender, a particular body-type, and sometimes even for certain skin colors - and that's acceptable. If you've ever eaten at the Carnivore in Nairobi, you know that they don't care about or cater to anyone other than meat-eaters. Aston Martin does not cater to poor people. etc. So why does Apple have to serve corporate clients?

Not only do I think they should avoid corporate customers, I also think catering to this clientele will cost Apple it's margins (profitability), as well as its reputation. As a commercial vendor, Apple will have to build products with specific features (security, manageability, interoperability); it will have to test products with greater rigor to ensure compatibility with applications built by 3rd parties; it will have to build a more extensive sales, service and support engine; and it will absorb a much greater change management burden to ensure that commercial clients are "whole" when then do upgrades, etc.

Even in the consumer space, Apple is going through some struggles with product quality. Now imagine if they'd sold the iPhone4 as a commercial product, and their antenna issues caused companies to lose business - there would be lawsuits galore ('cause let's face it, they're flush with cash, have a huge market cap, and are in some categories, dominating their markets) claiming lost income due to Apple's product flaws.

I think Apple was brilliant to deliberately step back from the commercial business (and think they should move away even more concertedly); it enabled them to dramatically streamline their business and operating model. As a consumer goods company, their only obligation is to the consumer. This allows them to:

1. Confine their sales channels (their stores, other resellers, the web).
2. Implement the most basic upgrade/switching support - easy to move from one Mac/iPod/iPhone to another, but not much else.
3. Focus their engineering efforts on specific and Apple-chosen consumer capabilities (aesthetics, music, photography, etc.) versus responding to features their corporate customers demand.

Corporations don't like as rapid a product update cycle as Apple is used to (it's too expensive and difficult for them to upgrade that often); they want a lot more "personal" care and feeding than Apple would want to fund; and they're a lot more particular about standards, compliance, interoperability, and a host of other things.

Further to #2 above, today the barriers to change are much lower in the home than the office (it's waaaay riskier and more expensive for corporations to upgrade or switch). Apple's success is predicated on a rapid innovation rate and the only market segment able to absorb that kind of re-purchase cycle is consumers. Why go after a market that can't keep up with your business?

By treating everyone in the same way - as mere consumers with disposable income and a sufficient degree of panache to be able to pull off owning an Apple device(!), Apple is able to go after the market that is most able to buy and buy often. Their customers' expectations are set and set clearly. If a corporation does wish to buy their products, they essentially have to do it as consumers.

By setting expectations correctly, Apple is not only able to remain focused while lowering their cost of doing business, they are also able to maintain their premium pricing, while creating an ever-more loyal fan/customer base who readily forgive Apple's mistakes and eagerly await their next Apple purchase. That's why a business should have the right to choose its customers - it allows it to set, live up to, and succeed based on clear expectations.

lunch

"If someone is going to eat our lunch, it may as well be us." This is an oft-quoted phrase in the business world. Its meaning is simple - we have a successful product in the market, the competition is after us; rather than allowing them to usurp our position in the market, we should do it ourselves with our own newer/better or altogether different products. Or put another way, better to cannibalize our own revenue streams and hold on to them vs. letting others take them from us.

However you say it, this sentence points me to one, very powerful truth: be more defined by what you will do than what you have done.

I'm not saying forget your past (though that's sometimes a huge temptation!), but rather that we can only control our future actions, that embracing paradigms that got us to a place may only serve to hold us back, and not allow progress.

Andy Zaky wrote a great post on the irrelevance of the iPod to Apple's future. In it, he includes two graphs - one showing the decline in iPod as a percentage of Apple revenue, and the other showing Apple's overall revenue growth.

The lesson - while the iPod was HUGE in resurrecting Apple (at its peak representing 55% of all Apple revenue, vs. 8% in the last quarter), and while it remains a significant contributor to revenue (and margins), Apple has moved on. They no longer count on the iPod as a growth engine, indeed, much of the decline in iPod sales is the direct result of the success of newer Apple products (iPhone, iPad). This is why new announcements from Apple are so well attended - people want to be connected to the next new thing, knowing that instantly the last (now old) new thing will be utterly outmoded and boring.

Of course there are many organizations that don't take this approach, and sometimes for good reason. If you have a cash cow that's amazingly productive, why stop milking it? Why not get every last drop out, especially when the latter "drops" are so much more profitable than the former. After all - new products are always risky, and may never come close to the potential of existing. Whilst these companies might not have the "innovation aura" that Apple has, they can be just fine, enjoying steady and predictable revenues and plodding growth.

It is possible though for this approach to lead to a state of strategic entrenchment, where an organization is so committed to a past formula for success, that it loses sight not just of future opportunity, but also present and future threats.

This behavior isn't confined to corporations; it also applies to other industries, education and government to name but two.

In education proposed change must be proven and peer-reviewed before it is accepted; we can't afford to do something untested to our children - a reasonable concern. (The problem of course is that you can't test innovation at scale without implementing it.) Consider for a moment how the current system was established - there was very little analysis, brain science didn't exist, and of course there was no research at the time that said learning was best accomplished in an authoritative, homogeneous, teacher-in-front, instructivist system. They just decided to do it that way.

I can understand not wanting to change if things are working really well (much like strategically-entrenched companies), but let's face it, education in America is not a success - dropouts are on the rise, and those that do graduate aren't learning nearly enough to be competitive with the rest of the world.

In education "historical success" is also something of a tautology - the "successful" graduates happen to be running the current system, and by definition, since it got them to this place, their education and the system they had was successful. Therefore innovation is less of a priority vs. "back to the old ways," and therefore there is very little open-mindedness to change. Sure they're willing to tweak things slightly, but real change ...no. There's no external motivation either because the parents are a product of the same old system, and there's no competition that is anywhere near the scale of the American public school system.

Change is therefore unlikely or even worse, impossible.

Governments face the exact opposite problem. Politicians measure success through action (at least that's how they promote themselves to the voters). Action = creating laws or setting up commissions, or I suppose, going on "fact-finding" tours. But because their goal is not a better society, but rather to get re-elected, success is merely passing laws, not passing good laws, or indeed enforcing existing laws; commissions only needed to happen, not resolve or repair anything.

I'm reminded of a West Wing episode where, among other things, the discussion is about the Republican vs. Democratic view on laws. Here's an exchange between Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes (with my emphasis):

AINSLEY: I'm a Republican ...I believe that every time the Federal Government hands down a new law, it leaves for the rest of us a little less freedom. So I say let's stick to the ones we absolutely need in order to have water come out of the faucet and our cars not stolen. That is my problem with passing a redundant law.

SAM: You know, you insist that government is depraved for not legislating against what we can see on the newsstands or what we can see in an art exhibit or what we can burn in protest or which sex we're allowed to have sex with or a woman's right to choose. But don't you dare try to regulate this deadly weapon I have concealed on me for that would encroach against my freedom.

AINSLEY: And Democrats believe in freedom of speech unless you want to pray while you're standing in school. And you believe in the freedom of information act except if you want to find out if your 14 year old has had an abortion.

SAM: We believe in the ERA. ... How can you have an objection...

AINSLEY: Because it's humiliating. A new amendment we vote on declaring that I am equal under the law to a man? I'm mortified to discover there's reason to believe I wasn't before. I'm a citizen of this country. I'm not a special subset in need of your protection. I do not have to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old white men. The same Article 14 that protects you protects me. And I went to law school just to make sure.

So like the commercial and education sectors, politicians can't resist the "tried and true approach" to governing. They will therefore make spurious, ill-conceived laws to try and look good to naive and frankly stupid voters. Like education, government has no competition, they know that most new politicians are just as dumb as they are, and follow the same traditions; they know this because enough of them will get reelected to ensure continuity. Yet again there is no sufficiently credible perceived competition to create a change in behavior.

Most corporations, school systems and governments are afraid to do something new or interesting; they are afraid to go beyond their self-imposed limits, and will therefore diminish whatever is connected to them. Is it any wonder so many parts of the American fabric are in decline?

Competition is crucial; it creates pressure and the urgency to outperform. When there is no competition (or perceived competition), you rest on your laurels and stagnate. This is less important for corporations - you only risk money; but when the stakes are as high as they are with education and government how can we afford to be sloths? There is competition in the tall grass, and it's not lazy.

We must seek to be defined by what we will do and not what we've done.

standard deviance

"The idea that you are a faceless cog in a benevolent system that cares about you and can't tell particularly whether you are worth a day's pay or not, is, like it or not, over." So wrote Seth Godin a few days ago.

There's a lot in this - and not just about work. We are, each and every one of us, unique. The way we look, the way we think, the way we dress, the way we work, the way we play - we are unique.

At first, I wondered if this was something that we did to ourselves - do we each need the comfort of being a cog because standing out makes us uneasy? Or are there other forces at play? (And if there are, how long have they been "playing" with us?)

In my limited experience, most parents of young children look to correlate their child's progress to published norms. They want to make sure s/he is at the right percentile physically, behaviorally, and intellectually. They may want their child to be at the "upper" end of the scale, but "normal" is just fine. Even the doctor's goal is to map every child to an expected norm.

Once in school, the measures become more tangible since we explicitly assess performance vs. set of pre-defined standards/expectations. We should of course note that these standards most closely resemble the management structure that Henry Ford implemented to build his Model T with one notable and evil addition.

Success for Ford was setting a standard of consistent, prolific production - millions of cars, all identical in quality, capability and performance. At that same time, kids were "institutionalized" to both manage the child labor problem and create lots of future factory workers. The schools adopted a similar approach to standards, with the shared goal of burping out millions of children, all identical and drone-like in knowledge and skill.

As factories have become a smaller and smaller part of the employment base, the need for hoards of similarly-skilled workers has also fallen. Whilst "they" do pay lip service to the idea that each child is unique and must be treated in accordance with their specific needs, capabilities and potential, actions speak louder than words. And just as in the 19th century, schools continue to have one standard, one set of assessments, one curriculum, and one teaching approach.

Even the latest "innovations" in learning embrace this idea of normed achievement. You might know that Common Core Standards were published on June 1 (2010), and have been heralded as a tremendous step forward for American education. As ever, success according to "them" is about burping out hoards of like-minded and like-abled drones. The only thing that's changed is type of drone. How sad.

The evil addition? The Bell Curve. In an attempt to patch the genericness, many schools (still) grade on a curve so they can normalize the results and create an achievement blend (say 20% great, 70% average, 10% poor).

In essence, we're assuming that everyone contributes (and must contribute) in an equal way - that there is only one meaningful measure of attainment as a student, and that nothing else matters. If a student doesn't measure up, it's the student's failing, and like at Henry Ford's plant, those cars don't graduate to the showroom. But unlike Ford (and this is the evil part), the curve implies that we can only have so much greatness; the rest of you are (whether you are or not), normal or failing.

Ironically, this implicitly limits a school's ability to graduate more than the specified number of great students, or less than the specified number of failing students!

As Seth pointed out, norming doesn't end when students graduate. The world of work is also normed - from recruiting to training ("on-boarding") to performance management - most organizations operate on the basis that all employees in a given level or role stratum are essentially equal; their contribution should be compared relatively, and they should be graded on a curve (a zero-sum game).

In each instance, we've bizarrely ignored our real and true instincts. When a child is born, it is (and forever will be) the most beautiful person their parents know. Their light will shine above all others, and remain brightest ...forever. When a parent looks at their child in school, some part of them has to want them to be the best, perhaps not the best of all, but certainly the best of themselves.

Surely every teacher, every principal, every minister of education wishes their education system to be the best, that it not be limited by any norm, but rather perform with excellence and graduate brilliant students. Surely there's no such thing as a good (and successful) business leader who aspires to not suck, or to not lose, or to be average, or not rise above the fray?

So if these leaders all expect the best of themselves and their organizations, how do they justify embracing standards that require the people they serve or the people they employ to be merely average? Seth is urging us to rebel against the system, to proclaim individuality in the face of facelessness. 

Bravo.