The Students are Not the Problem: From Symptoms to Systems in Education
Real change in schooling will require we move from addressing symptoms to shifting systems.
Solving for Symptoms
From the outside, Palo Alto, CA seems just about perfect. Set at the center of Silicon Valley, this very wealthy suburb is home to many of tech’s world-changing-entrepreneurs-turned-billionaires that one reads about in the papers. It is a beautiful suburb, with year-round good weather, quiet tree-lined neighborhood streets, low crime, and Stanford University’s campus in its midst.
Palo Alto schools are well-known for their high standards of excellence and intensely competitive environments — both of its high schools rank in the top fifty best schools in the state, and nearly 95 percent of Palo Alto students graduate from high school, many going on to attend elite universities.
But beneath the veneer of perfection is a troubling trend: a teen suicide rate that is more than four times the national average and the highest in the country. There were suicide clusters in 2009–2010 and 2014–2015, and this 2017–2018 school year sadly started with the suicide of another promising young local student.
The plight of Palo Alto students has received nationwide attention in the media. The Center for Disease control conducted an epidemiological study, hotlines have been created (the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1–800–784–2433 is always available to anyone wanting to speak with a crisis counselor), extra therapists were hired, and there have been a number of initiatives to try to help students who are suffering and prevent further deaths — yet the anxiety and depression persist.
A mere hour’s drive from Palo Alto, Oakland Unified School District faces a different set of challenges, albeit with considerably less national attention. Oakland is a vibrant, multi-ethnic, arts-rich, urban area. While the city itself is socio-economically diverse, OUSD’s schools serve a high proportion of low-income and minority students, and the schools struggle to keep students engaged and on track: over 35 percent of students do not graduate from high school in four years, and this number is higher for Black and Latino students, particularly boys.
Many programs and initiatives have been created to try to re-engage students, including introducing trauma-informed care, making curricula relevant, and restorative discipline practices to reduce suspension and drop-out rates — yet the disengagement and dropout problems persist.
Neither of these communities is unique. While it may have received national attention, Palo Alto is not alone in its struggles with anxiety, depression, and suicide. Middle and high-income communities across the United States are experiencing the highest rates of teen anxiety and depression ever recorded. Anxiety and depression, in that order, are now the most common mental health diagnoses among college students, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.
And Oakland is not alone in its struggles with dropouts, disengagement, and discipline issues. While dropout rates have been falling, and the difference in drop-out rates between racial groups has been considerably reduced, low-income students nationwide are still nearly four times as likely to drop out of school than their wealthier counterparts. In California, Black and Latino students are disproportionately more likely to drop out of school: more than one in five African American high school students and nearly one in every seven Latino students drops out of school before graduating.
Across the country communities and schools are scrambling to create solutions to these issues. Like in Palo Alto and Oakland, most of these involve creating programs that target students who are “at risk”. While these programs are important for the individuals they help, long-term these initiatives are highly unlikely to stop the epidemics of anxiety and depression or disengagement and dropouts:
the solutions are almost always symptoms-focused instead of systems-focused and thus are not dealing with root systemic causes of the problems.
From Symptoms to Systems
A metaphor for the difference between symptoms and root systems causes is a factory polluting a town’s water system.
The polluted water causes a range of illness symptoms that manifest differently in different people — some people don’t experience anything, some people develop joint pain or nausea, while still others develop cancer — yet all are caused by the polluted water. It’s important to treat the individuals’ symptoms, but this is just triage — unless you address the systemic issue and clean the water, the symptoms will just keep developing in new individuals.
To make a long-term positive change in schooling requires we move beyond addressing individuals’ symptoms and employ systems thinking. We must see schooling as a dynamic complex system that is linked with and affected by other dynamic social and economic systems in our society. A system is, “an integrated whole whose essential properties arise from the relationships between its parts, and ‘systems thinking’ [is] the understanding of a phenomenon within the context of a larger whole”.[i]
Systems thinking focuses on understanding phenomena within the context of the whole and it can be contrasted with analytical thinking, which focuses on breaking the world into its component parts and trying to understand how each component works.
A tell-tale sign that something is a systems issue is when symptoms are widespread and predictably patterned across different kinds of people and situations (e.g. anxiety and depression across many high-performing institutions, drop-outs in low-income institutions, or differential performance by race or SES).
This indicates there are systemic issues: it means the system shapes environments (e.g. through incentives or direct policy) in ways that create a high probability people within them will react in a particular way, regardless of personality or location differences.
To be clear, this does not mean that ALL individuals in a certain environment will manifest the same symptoms: it increases the likelihood but it is not deterministic. An epidemic doesn’t require that everyone gets sick.
It’s important to note that, just like in the case of polluted water,
in schooling the real problem does not lie in individuals. While some individuals may be more susceptible to illness, the cause of the illness is in their environment — in the way the system is set-up — not in the person.
I point this out because we often both talk about and research these problems in schooling as though it is the individuals themselves who have something wrong with them and we have to find a way to fix them.
The equivalent questions from our polluted water metaphor might be pointing out the community up the road with clean water, or to a person within the town who hasn’t yet developed symptoms, and saying — “see, these people don’t have an issue — the problem is weakness of the people who have fallen ill — how do we make them more like the healthy people?” Rather than asking “how might we create an environment that would leave most people healthy?”.
From this perspective, the fact that students in high-performing schools across the country are becoming depressed at high rates, or that students in low-income schools are dropping out at high rates, has little to do with the individual personalities or stories —
the students themselves are not the problem.
I want to shout this from the rooftops. The behavior or psychological reaction of individuals is really just a symptom of the way the system is currently designed.
In the case of any “epidemic” or patterned issue — anxiety and depression, or demotivation, or teacher and principal turnover or burnout, or persistent patterns of performance differences between demographic groups — ALL are systemic issues. These are not issues with individuals; rather, we are maintaining a system that creates predictable patterns of responses in individuals. Thus, none of these patterned, widespread issues can be solved with programs targeting individuals:
We have to shift the system.
Shifting Systems
In systems-theory, shifting a teleological or purpose-driven system requires clarifying the vision and goals, which cannot be done without a clear understanding of the purpose. Thus, the first step towards systems-change requires an in-depth understanding of the core purposes of schooling as a system — we must define the “problem of schooling” correctly. Generating solutions to the wrong problem may create “innovation,” but it won’t necessarily create positive change, and often just creates new symptoms. I talk about this idea of asking better questions in a Medium piece here.
From our water metaphor, this is like assuming the issue is bacteria, chlorinating water to kill germs, and finding it both creates its own toxicity and doesn’t actually address the pollution really causing the problem.
Today, we tend to frame the purpose of schooling in very individualistic and instrumental ways. Think even of the connotation behind the names of policies like “Race to the Top” or “No Child Left Behind” — the implicit idea is there is a “top” and we’re all racing to get there. This is due in large part to the fact that schooling system is embedded in the larger socio-economic system, and growing economic inequality combined with rapid technological change has limited the number of livable wage jobs in that system. This has caused us to try to change the purpose of schooling to be a way to sort individuals into that unequal economic system, which has distorted the goals and vision for schooling.
For instance, “college and career readiness” are big buzzwords in school reform right now. This is partly because we see that having a college degree makes it more likely you’ll be in of the top 50% of income earners. The real material implications of ending up at the bottom in a society that has drastically cut social safety nets are considerable. We begin to see schooling primarily as an instrumental mechanism for individuals to compete in that highly unequal job market. We start programs and implement policies to make sure everyone gets a college degree. The “problem” to be solved is now “how do we make sure every child gets a college degree?” The solutions are varied but almost all of them ignore the fact that, from a macro-perspective, if 50% of jobs don’t pay a living wage, then 50% of people won’t have a living wage — even if everyone gets a Ph.D.
Schooling cannot solve socio-economic inequality at a systems level. This is something we have to do through our socio-economic policies.
Furthermore, framing the purpose of schooling this way makes school a field of competition for limited places at the economic table rather than a place of learning, development, and socialization.
People begin to cut corners to achieve the metrics, and believe equity is about the metric not the content of the experience. What students are meant to actually get out of the college degree gets ignored and then dismissed — not because of “bad” educators but because the system has created incentives for succeeding according to these metrics that are strong and the consequences of failing (poverty, food insecurity, poor healthcare) are so dire.
The end result is that none of the objectives are achieved. We lose out — as individuals and as a society — on the actual learning, socialization, and experiences that college could provide that would contribute to future innovation and economic growth.
Organizing our schooling system this way undermines what schools actually could do for all students, and it also allows us to sidestep the hard conversation we need to have as a society about economic inequality.
To return full circle: organizing schooling for sorting and competition also makes the symptoms we see — the anxiety, depression, demotivation, and burnout — fully predictable effects of a misaligned system, rather than a confusing array of unrelated symptoms.
Our symptomatic solutions may help some students overcome their anxiety or depression, but it won’t stop the system from creating the same symptoms in the next cohort of children. REENVISIONED’s Tye Ripma writes about his experience seeing this firsthand as a district behavior specialist in our blog post this month here.
If we want to make lasting positive change in education we need to both see the system and solve the right problem.
But what is the “right” problem for schooling from a systems perspective?
After seven years of intensive research and study at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and listening to the stories of hundreds of REENVISIONED catalysts, I actually do have an answer to that question! My team has limited me to 2000 words per month though, check out next month’s big shift to read about it :) [[update: the next shift - Organizing Schooling for Possibility instead of Efficiency — now posted!]]
If you’re a curious person and want to know more before February, you can check out the full dissertation (from which some of this article is excerpted), called: “Why School?: A Systems Perspective on Creating Schooling for Flourishing Individuals and a Thriving Democratic Society,” or watch the 30 minute defense talk summarizing the ideas.
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[i] (Capra & Luisi, 2016; Senge, 2010).
