A Thousand Miles per Gallon and Zero to Sixty in 1 Second

Let’s say you run a huge racing organization that employs millions of people and owns hundreds of thousands of vehicles. A new vehicle getting 1000 mpg and able to accelerate from 0 to 60 in one second has been available for some time. It is available for a price that is a fraction of what you are paying now. It is far safer than the current model you are racing and handles superbly. It is far better in every way. Why haven’t you begun to replace your current fleet? This is especially true since many of your huge foreign competitors changed to the new model years ago and have been consistently beating you in races since then.
Your reluctance to replace your current Model T Fords with the new model is based on an infrastructure you have in place that would have to be totally retooled if you were to change to the new model. The drivers would have to be retrained and qualified in the new cars on the track. The mechanics would have to be retrained or likely replaced because the new vehicles are massively different than the old ones you have. While you can keep the old ones running with baling wire and binder twine, the new ones are computer-controlled and while far more reliable, require a much more skilled work force to maintain.

You are forced to consider seriously the painful change to the new vehicles because your market share is dwindling as fans gravitate toward the winners instead of your comparatively poorer performance. You realize that your employee unions will fight you on any change because they are comfortable at their current pay and benefit levels compared to what they could earn with their out-dated skills in the global market. Your management team is also narrow and limited in their approach and would find it difficult to compete outside of your organization as well. Yet, you have had to adjust your staffing levels downward in recognition of your dwindling market share. Your attempts to raise ticket prices to compensate have met with strong resistance.

The story above is a good analogy to the current situation for our vast American public school system. While our competitor nations are providing their children with increasingly higher quality education opportunities American education is entrenched in a rut of epic proportions. Many of the philosophies of our education system have their roots in the progressive movement a century ago. At that time the progressives who took control of the education schools and hence education decisions put in place an education philosophy much more interested in “socializing” students to make them pliable to state control than in teaching them subject matter. These foundational values are still powerful in education circles today.

The race analogy applies to the current emergence of stiff global competition in the race our kids are entering as they attempt to find productive and decent paying jobs. In today’s increasing emphasis on knowledge skills we can’t afford to continue our weak performance in teaching our kids literacy, math, science, history, etc. compared to their foreign peers. We have been losing the race for decades. If you compare the 1983 A Nation at Risk report to the 2007 Tough Choices or Tough Times report you have to admit that our competitive situation has not improved and has instead gotten steadily worse in the 25 years since A Nation at Risk came out. We are sending our kids unarmed into the global competition which doesn’t bode well for our future.

You might ask how we can ignore such a huge problem. The answer is in the installed base of education insiders who have been trained to believe that the old, ineffective things they learned in education school are the best (the Model T Ford analogy). Also, the laws governing the public education system are basically a straight jacket that specifies the process so tightly that it is a difficult (not impossible, but difficult) task to try to perform competitively in spite of the system. Since the education school leadership programs have not trained their graduates to be change leaders, only maintainers, the system is mired in a status quo rut. While we have increased spending on education far faster than inflation the performance is slowly getting worse versus our foreign competitors. A big part of that is they are improving quickly while we are mired in place.

What do we need to do to become competitive in the global race?

• First, we have to face facts. Continuing to try to improve performance by appointing multi-year task groups to study and recommend solutions that amount to small “tweaks” to the system will not work any better in the future than it has in the past. Foundational changes are required in how things are done in education if our kids are to be prepared for the competition they are facing. We need to stop wasting time. It is easy to figure out what must be done. It is apparently hard for education leaders to face that and move in the right direction.

• Second, we have to realize and force educators to realize that much of the “process mantra” that has been drilled into them in their education school experiences does not stand up to scientific scrutiny and must be eliminated.

• Third, we need to “retool” the current leadership cadre to become effective change leaders. Change is the only constant in our world and having a leadership group in place that do not have the competency to lead change is a formula for continuing failure.

• Fourth, we need the legislatures and bureaucrats to specify desired results not process. The current system of specifying process very tightly increases costs due to the tracking and audit requirements while allowing very little room for creativity or tailoring to local unique conditions.

• Fifth, we need teachers who know the subject matter well. Since education schools focus the vast majority of their curricula on process (pedagogy) they graduate students who have been exposed to very little subject knowledge.

• Sixth, we need to greatly increase our achievement standards to a world-class level so that our kids will have the opportunity to learn enough to compete with their foreign peers.

The record of the past decades shows that this will take a really strong demand on the part of the public to get done. The politicians mostly support the status quo because it is far easier than taking on the education power groups and actually serving the needs of our kids. Besides, politicians get huge campaign contributions from education power groups who like the status quo. As a union president once said, “If the kids could vote in union elections and pay dues, I would advocate for them but they can’t and I advocate for the members who can.” In other words the ed power groups are much more concerned about maintaining their place at the public trough than they are about the mission of educating the kids.