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Reform & Transform: A Difference that Makes All the Difference!

The great systems thinker and designer, Russell Ackoff, tried during his lifetime to help people understand that continuously improving a poor system is just a path for getting worse faster. In those discussions he talked about reform and transform. Unfortunately, most of educational "change" over the past several decades (right up to the very recent past and present) has focused on "reform."

Reform: to leave a system as it is and try to change its behavior by modifying the means it employs. (Ackoff)

Reform, then, is a lot of talk about changing things and improving things. For our culture, this usually means doing more of the same - or faster. If a few math credits in the past seemed to work, lets increase the number of math credits. If a clear curriculum with scope and sequence worked in the past, let's make it more clearer and more detailed. In short, we try to mess with processes and to a lesser extent structures without changing the essential functions OR we declare a new set of functions (e.g. "We are no longer in the business of sorting and selecting students -all must succeed") and continue to adhere to the same structures and processes that sorted and selected in the first place (grading, credit chasing via Carnegie units, seat time, tracking, artificially separating courses and disciplines as if they have little to do with one another, etc).

What we all need to focus on is transformation: changing both the system's objectives/ends and the means of achieving those ends. If education is now about ensuring success for all, for acquiring a very different set of skills from those needed in 1900, then we cannot continue to run schools as factories, treat teachers as line workers and, worst of all, treat students as raw material ready to be altered into some pre-defined final product. (Everyone knows and expects raw material going into a GM Camaro factory will come out, with little or no deviation, a Camaro). Learning, people, students are not raw materials to be made into pre-defined final products . . . so why do we insist on so rigorously hanging onto the factory model and only play around the fringes?

The Iowa Core/Common Core is a great example. A great start outlining what students might need to know to be successful (at least our best guess given our inability to accurately predict the future - who saw the Kinect coming so fast, really?). If we attempt to implement the Common Core through the vehicle and mechanisms of the Machine Age it is doomed to failure - making it the next "bandwagon idea." What's frustrating is that the "bandwagon ideas" of the past 30 years have been all very interesting, thoughtful, and tranformational - the problem is that we refuse to deal with the deeper issue: the Mechanical and Biological Systems paradigms that made America great in the 20th century are ill-equipped and simply incompatible with what we need today.

A quick look across the country seems to suggest that the carrying capacity of the Machine-Age school is about at the 80% proficiency rate - and that is on Machine-Age conceptions of learning, the standardized test. Therefore, even on tests aligned with its own paradigm, it can only be expected to be 8 of 10. Actually, this is an amazing accomplishment! A system specifically designed to sort and select has somehow found a way to get 8 of 10 kids over the bar at peak performance! Astounding! Unfortunately, its not enough.

So join me and the other "crazies" who are banding together virtually and face-to-face to forge a new vision for education that identifies the new set of functions schools need to produce AND provides examples of the structures and processes necessary to make it all happen.

Oh yeah, one more thing, the bad news is that we can't continuously improve into something new and working on one or two things at a time won't work. Social systems are so interconnected and interdependent that we must work on a new solution as a set: how we validate learning, how we organize teachers, how we compensate teachers, how we fund schools, how we organize students, etc, etc. has to be designed up front and implemented in concert.

The good news - people lile Jamshid Gharajedaghi, Susan Leddick and burgeoning systems scientists like myself and many of my colleagues and friends - know how to do this! With your passion and expertise in your area and we in systems design, we become a force that can't be stopped!!

Call me crazy.

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