Getting the Job vs Doing the Job
Why efforts to change education are failing
For decades, researchers, pundits, policy makers, practitioners, and professors have been trying to improve the way the education system works. These improvement efforts sometimes gain significant traction and change the face of the educational system — new standards, shared decision making teams, more frequent assessments, and evaluation principles from the Jack Welch book of management. However, none of these efforts have produced a fraction of the effect intended.
So, why do the billions of dollars spent on changing education not have the intended effect? The engineers of these efforts are forgetting the most important part of the equation. It’s not that any of these ideas were bad ideas. Standards, assessments, evaluations, and shared decision making teams are all good, but the reality is that changing education requires an acceptance that we are trying to change habits of behavior on an individual level at an enormous scale.
What if we attempted to improve education, not by proposing some radical change to the fabric of education, but by a simple commitment to some basic principles that we overwhelmingly believe are effective? Like, lesson planning, some explicit instruction balanced with guided practice and independent application, and attention to the social emotional development of students?
None of these things are crazy, and they are currently taught to most pre-service teachers. So how would this be a change?
The problem is one that requires an organization developer’s attention. Pre-service teachers learn to lesson plan, write objectives, match pedagogy to learning targets, and balance learning activities. They have to do these things to pass student teaching and to get their first job. However, once they get that job, these behaviors quickly fall off, because the overwhelming culture in educational institutions is not to do these things.
Maybe lesson planning is not part of educational culture because teachers are overworked with mundane tasks, or because of something else. But the reality is that new teachers quickly become enculturated to a set of instructional behaviors that cement the status quo. The promise of improving education is not some radical, fancy pedagogical trick. The promise is in doing basic educational things with reliability in thousands and thousands of schools.
This is an incredibly difficult thing to change, because it is not simply about teaching teachers a different set of skills, obviously. Pre-service teachers sat through the current dominant practices for 13 years as a student, and enjoyed it to the degree that they decided to spend their life within that institution. Educational reform is really about a large scale organizational development intervention, not any grand or fantastical educational practices.
If we reframe the problem we are trying to solve, and think about what norms we are creating and use an OD lens to try and solve them, we may make much greater improvements. It won’t be as flashy and won’t win any ideological debates, but it will move our achievement needle in the direction we need.
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
