I am the father of two wonderful human beings (a clearly objective statement): Son Bill and daughter Lacey. They are all grown up and living their own lives now, Bill a high school science teacher in the Fort Worth area and Lacey a high school math teacher in the Austin area. (Lord knows why with a father who is employed as a superintendent and a mother who is employed as an elementary teacher they chose teaching as a profession, but each of them did.) When they were young, they competed. They got jealous. They talked about things being unfair because one of them got something the other didn’t. Sibling rivalry. We (wife and I as a team) recognized it and constantly worked to communicate that each of them were loved equally and totally, each of them had value and gifts, and as parents we would never favor one over the other but attempt to do the best we could for both. We were a family, that bond transcending petty rivalries.
A family works to help, promote, love and support all members. If a family member was sick or injured our resources and attention went to that member. If a family member had success in anything, our celebration was family-wide, we were all proud. I have loved watching my kids grow up. By high school and beyond the sibling rivalry disappeared and with their growing maturity they really got it, each of them supporting the other. When Bill got married, Lacey really celebrated. When Lacey got engaged, Bill really celebrated. Families (in the best and healthiest ways) are wonderful mental models to use when thinking of mutually supportive, collaborative groups. A group of friends works well too. A church family works well too. A high performing military unit, a civic organization, a group of neighbors, a team on an assembly line, and on and on, there are multiple examples of groups of humans who work for each other to promote and support each other in ways that exemplify mutually supportive, highly collaborative human groups. I love being a member of such groups. The feelings I experience in such groups is so much more positive, more caring, more productive than any other groups of which I am a member. When I am in need, I turn to such groups. If another member of the group has needs, I am there to help and support. In my mind, these groups are the highest evolved human organizations we have.
So, what about public schools? Should teachers compete or collaborate? Should we reward some teachers for higher performance or should we promote teams of teachers working together for the best results? What about schools? Should we reward campuses for higher performance or should we promote a school-wide team that not only works together for higher performance, but also works with other schools in the system to help them? What about school districts? Should we promote competition and reward for one district performing better than another, or should we promote a mental model of public schools that empowers collaboration among and between school systems for every increasing success with kids? Should we think of public schools using the model of Ford vs. Toyota, or think of schools using the model of the family and the church?
As I look at the current reform models for public education it appears to me that we have two distinctive philosophical camps. One promotes competition, one promotes collaboration. One would increase the number of charter schools so that public schools must compete with other tax supported schools. One promotes rewarding some schools and punishing others. One promotes allowing parents to move kids from one school to another and take their tax dollars with them (vouchers) to promote competition. One promotes ever increasing reliance on standardized testing to measure the merits of the classroom, school and district so that schools may be ranked, so that it can be determined who wins the school super bowl. In short, one promotes classroom, school and school district competition. This model of reform was not developed by school folks. It was developed by and superimposed by private sector thinking. It is, in my opinion, seriously intellectually flawed. It is moving us in directions that do not help kids. It is the application of the wrong mental model to the wrong organization. It is immoral.
Why? Because the taxes collected to teach kids are universally collected and should be spent to support a universal support for student success, however we measure such success. Amazing to me is that anyone would ever promote competition between schools and systems, especially using universally collected tax dollars. That model sets schools to compete for money from a common pot. This is not Ford vs. Toyota competing for consumer dollars from individuals. This is schools competing with each other for money from the common pot. Every dollar that goes to charter schools takes universally collected tax dollars away from public schools. The public still pays the same amount, but some school district somewhere is losing money and kids so that a so called “competitor” for public schools gets money. That philosophy neither helps the public nor the schools. It helps promote the wrong mental model.
If I am a teacher and I find a way to help kids learn I should be motivated as part of the family of teachers to share that strategy. If I am a principal and I find a way to promote student success on my campus I should be motivated as part of the family of public schools to share that strategy with other schools. If I am a superintendent (well, OK, I am today) and I find a way to help promote student success that works in my district I should be motivated to share that strategy with other districts so that their students do well too. That includes personnel. If I have a truly gifted teacher, a truly gifted principal, a truly gifted central office administrator who has found ways to help promote student success and highly performing collaborative teams, I should be willing to share that person with others. Public education is for all kids. Any effort to encourage teachers, principals or superintendents to withhold information from other classrooms, schools or districts should be abolished. That hurts kids. All the “reforms” push us toward competition, not collaboration. In my value structure, that’s immoral, akin to a doctor discovering a cure for something and refusing to share it with others in the medical profession for the sake of self gain. Such thinking is worse, because the gain is from the common pot, not from individual consumer choice.
We spent a lot of time last year working on the components of what we called “Active Engagement” or “Ride for the Brand.” It is what we believe are the key elements of being a professional in EISD. We narrowed the vast array of attributes down to six. One of them is “We are team oriented.” That is crucial; it implies collaboration, not competition.
At the state level and in each district, superintendents have spent a lot of time over the last few years working on a common vision for public schools as an alternative to the “reform” movement. This document, entitled “Creating a New Vision for Public Education in Texas” can be found at http://www.tasanet.org/sites/tasa/files/visioning/workinprogress.pdf. It is a response to the reform movement, a statement of what professional educators would envision for public schools in Texas. It is mostly very good, but in my mind misses the crucial point, fails to identify the mental model we should use for public schools. It does say in the very last article, “Article V: Organizational Transformation, Supporting Premises, letter Vm: We hold that: Operating and social systems exist in all organizations including schools. Transforming these systems is the only way to transform schools into the type of organization needed.” This is as close as the new vision comes to addressing mental models for schools, and stops woefully short of simply saying schools should collaborate, not compete. Until we in the profession agree and act in a collaborative way rather than a competitive way, we are failing our kids and everyone else’s kids too.
Do not get me wrong, there are times and a places for schools and kids to compete. Learning how to handle the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in a mature way is an essential skill. All UIL competition is set up for competition. (Interesting, though, that in this most competitive subset of public education that the rules for competition are developed collaboratively for the sake of leveling the playing field and ensuring that no school has an advantage.) But competition is a lower level skill, not a highly evolved human skill. Learning to collaborate is upper level stuff. We do not have to learn to compete, animals in the jungle do that, young children do that, even many adults have adopted the competitive model for their way of viewing the world. Some of these adults see the world as a racial competition. Some as gender competition. Some as religious competition. Some as income and status competition. So be it. I suspect for each of these adults when they are stressed, or pressed, or hurt, or in need of support, they do not turn to a competitive group, they turn to a collaborative group to get through the pain and thereby reveal that the groups they value most are not competitive. And I wonder why they promote the notion that we in public education should all compete.
You are right. The idea that there are losers in education makes no sense. We should see every pre-kinder child entering this year as a winner and we should not have to compete to make sure they are successful.
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