When I was interviewed on the Charlie Rose a while back, the interviewee who preceded me was the CEO of a major corporation in the high-tech sector. As I listened to him, I headed him say again and again, “We have to constantly re-invent ourselves. We re-invent ourselves every few years, or we die.”
I understand why that would be true in the fast-moving, ever-changing world of high technology. If you don’t come up with new products, faster ways of doing things, new applications, new paradigms, etc., you are left behind, you lose, you disappear.
But this way of looking at the world and adapting to the moment is not right for every form of human endeavor.
Schools, like families and religious institutions, evolve to meet new social demands. None of these basic institutions look precisely as they did a century ago. We have new configurations of all of them. But none changes overnight. None reinvent themselves very 2-3 years. Basic human institutions require stability to function well. There must be a measure of predictability, not constant upheaval and churn.
Some people think that the unceasing changes in society promotes mental illness. I don’t know if that is true, but it sounds plausible. We are all under tremendous stress: economic, societal, environmental. We need solidity and stability in parts of our lives, not planned disruption and engineered chaos.
This teacher wrote a thoughtful comment about the need for stability.
An excellent school runs like a finely-tuned engine. There are literally hundreds of formal and informal procedures that make a school environment positive and efficient. These procedures have been developed over time and what works in one building may not work in another, depending on such simple things as physical layout of the school, the number of staff available, the scheduling of things like lunch, recess and bathroom time, the scheduling of specials such as art, music and physical education (IF you have these), and the storage and access to teaching materials. It also depends on more complex items such as the positive behavioral intervention strategies that are used to ensure a positive learning environment in a school. It is veteran teachers who know these finely tuned procedures. You cannot write them down and hand them on a list to a teacher new to a school. They have to be learned little by little with the help of experienced teachers. Teachers are dependent upon each other. Cooperation takes an understanding of these procedures and it takes personal knowledge and trust in other teachers. This takes time to develop and energy from both the new teacher and the veteran teachers. The higher the teacher turnover, the more energy and time spent learning, revising and teaching these procedural strategies.
One simple example from last year: I was assigned a different classroom. The change was from a relatively isolated room on the second floor to a room off the main entrance hall to the school. As a teacher of students with cross categorical special education needs, I am in and out of my room often. Many of the students need a learning space that has few distractions. It took many extra hours and experimentation to develop a classroom layout that met the needs of the children and was also welcoming to parents and other visitors to the school. I need my materials at my fingertips and my students need stability. Each rearrangement of the classroom meant re-teaching procedures to students and some trial and error with materials placement. Was educational time maximized last year? No. Was my stress level higher? Yes. Was my work load larger? Yes. Did it all work out OK? Yes, because other teachers had my back, I knew all the other hundreds of small things that make this school run well, and I knew my students and they knew me. This small change made a difference. Imagine changing numerous teachers from school to school. You don’t need research to answer the question of why high turnover decreases learning. Just ask a veteran teacher.
“not planned disruption and engineered chaos.” The demands of the corporate (almost typed coprolite, those pesky Freudian slips) sector are based on the fact that the corporation’s main legal responsibilitly is to supply “shareholder value” i.e., maximize profit value. Whatever it takes to do so is what works, including the vaunted “creative destruction” practices (which have a tendency to destroy the low level folks’ lives while enriching those at the top).
We can’t emphasize this enough “Public schools do not have the same goal, maximizing profits, as does the business sector”. Public schools have the goal of “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people”-MO Constitution. Nothing about profits, creative destruction, shareholder values, etc. . . . One best does this through equitable and just funding for our public schools that many times are the base/center of stability of a community.
Stability is vital to schools; wish we had it at our school. My children attend an “exemplary” rated school in Austin, Texas. The principal of our school is totally fixated on data, test-based instruction and test scores. Increasingly, the students are becoming more bored, frustrated, angry and resentful. Due to an increased amount of parental complaints, the principal decided to take action. And rather than address the underlying problems of instruction and curriculum, she decided to uproot 17 teachers (there are 47 teachers at the school) and reassign them to different grade levels/classrooms. Instability and upheaval only creates more problems for teachers and students.
This action is to stop the complaints? I would hardly think so.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the upcoming market share battle between Windows 8 and Chrome, and what that means for stability in education. Google has (so far) stayed out of the political drive to seize control of education technology through federal mandate, and is instead marketing competitive engineering advances that could destabilize hardware, software, and delivery systems across the whole tech sector through actual technical innovation.
With no real concern for education, child development, democracy, or civil rights, ignorant technology entrepreneurs have dragged public education into the fog of battle in titanic marketing struggles. They’ll say anything and buy anybody to capture regulatory power, so they can force children, teachers, and taxpayers to consume their obsolescent products and services.
While our kids go hungry in front of their shoddy laptops, useless Smartboards clog our storerooms, and miles of expensive low-speed wiring choke our buildings. Worse, we’re trapped in the maze of “accountability” to garbage and lies they constructed to destabilize and destroy public responsibility for our children’s learning.
And their dynasties may very wall fall anyway.
“…my students need stability.” And so do mine, especially when they come from home environments and situations that are in a constant state of insecurity over the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and legal and/or custody issues. For many of my students, school provides an oasis of caring that makes it possible for them to learn, and may just be the best seven hours of their day. At school they are assured of breakfast, lunch, access to school-based health care, and supervision and instruction from a committed faculty and staff with deep roots in the community, from the time the bus picks them up in the morning until they are safely returned in the afternoon. Along with knowing all the established routines and unwritten subtleties that go into operating our school on a daily basis, we also know our children – their strengths, needs, personalities, families, who they can or can’t work with, what strategies do or don’t work for them, and we monitor and adjust as necessary to promote their continued growth while ensuring their safety and stability. We are a village and we’re doing a pretty good job raising our children to become competent and caring citizens because we know and value the difference between human capital and human beings.
Regarding the teacher’s reference to a great school being “a finely tuned engine”, I could not agree more. If one piece of the machine changes, all parts are impacted. Most outside the profession have no idea of a school’s complexity. As a matter of fact, many new teachers are in the dark as well, leaving the smooth running of the machine up to the veteran teachers. Some will stay and become veterans, and well run schools will start to count on them for stability. I worry there will be very few veteran teachers in our schools, real soon – Mark, a recently retired veteran of 31 years