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Educational Process Reform Discussions on reform of the education system miss a crucial point: it is the process of education that needs reform in order enable the other reforms. Significant innovation in the content, instructional methodology, administration, or other aspects of education can not take root and grow within the current process. They can only flourish within a special environment, typically with additional resources, but then wither and die when translated into conventional classrooms. This is evident in the extraordinary observation that every single attempt at methodology innovation in education in the United States for the last 70+ years, good and bad, has had its day and then sunk from sight into oblivion. Consider SRA readers, an individualized reading program that had great success in the 1960s. Although the program still exists as part of McGraw-Hill, who has ever heard of it? Or consider a more unsettling example. We know a (former) teacher of mathematics in the highly regarded public school system of Brookline, Massachusetts. He had been a gifted teacher, inspiring his students to not only perform well in their grade level work but to excel: they were learning 1½ years of math in one year. The result? He was called on the carpet and told to hold back his students or be dismissed. He left. In fact, it is easy to understand the problem he created. The next year, those students would move into classes with a different teacher and with students who had advanced only one year of math in the prior school year. So, some were half a year ahead of their classmates, and created great difficulties for the teachers, and indeed for the students as well who had to sit through half a year of instruction in material they already knew. Any individual change in teaching efficacy in the system we have today will prove disruptive, and the system within which teachers must work cannot handle disruptions. Unless all teachers and all students can improve in lockstep, any temporary changes are forced from the system. The system simply cannot handle it. This process of expelling disruptive changes, together with the increase in costs that have accompanied each innovation, has been what has sunk each one. Or, from a student's perspective, consider what happens to a bright math student. As a reward for learning the material quickly and well, she will be given more problems of the same sort they already learned quickly. That will teach her, all right. Our school system can be directly compared with a manufacturing assembly line. It works at its greatest efficiency when each worker at each station can do their job at a steady pace. Imagine what would happen if each car coming down the line moved at different speeds. Chaos. Or, worse than the math student example, consider what happens to special needs students. Children with learning disabilities of one form or another cost a great deal more to teach effectively. They need small classes with teachers holding specialized qualifications, or even one to one instruction with individualized curricula. Because of the cost, they are frequently given less than they need to make progress, year after year, and fall steadily behind. We often see children who are coming to the end of elementary school and who can only read at a first or second grade level, if they can read at all. Some of the stories are heartrending. Yet, perhaps most alarming of all is that the teachers and administrators responsible for special needs students will either say that they are doing just fine, willfully ignoring the bald evidence, or they will say, give us another year and he or she will do just fine. Yes, indeed, let's just do the same thing again that hasn't worked for 4 or 5 years, perhaps with cosmetic changes, and of course the outcome will be different and also make up for all the prior deficiencies. What makes this particularly incomprehensible is that the staff actually believe what they say, and these are good people who genuinely care about the children. A kind of groupthink sets in that causes them to not see what is in front of them on a daily basis. Apart from a few radicals, no one can think outside of the box. How To Change Educational Process We are convinced that serious education reform cannot come from within the teaching profession, because professional educators are simply too close to the problem, or at best can only imagine tinkering with the system in terms of methodology and/or content. Changing how well someone bolts a door onto a frame on the assembly line is not going to be a solution when what is needed is to do away with the assembly line altogether. Imagine that we built cars the way we teach children: every car would be quite different, some getting 100's of miles per gallon, others from the same assembly line would get only 5, if they ran at all. But children are not cars, and we can't educate them like we build cars. We need to pull the educators out of the metaphorical box in which their thinking is trapped if we are to have an educational system that maximizes the learning that is accomplished by each child. Business Process Re-Engineering Principles In other words, educational processes have to be treated like any other business process. We have a model and a proven methodology for accomplishing this: Business Process Re-Engineering. Where it has been applied intelligently, it has produced dramatic gains in productivity. Witness Amazon.com, Google, and countless other success stories where the entire paradigm changed in ways that were unthinkable before the Internet. For a start, read any of the books by Michael Hammer. We are cautioned by examples of where it has been applied inappropriately or unintelligently, resulting in a disappointment or an outright failure. However, as was pointed out in one of our references, usually failure in re-engineering results from attempts to automate existing business processes. Re-engineering succeeds when it implements an entirely new process, one that is radically different from past practice, and usually one that is only possible using the assist of modern technology. If we are to be serious about reforming education in this country, then we have to approach it the same way: through careful and thoughtful analysis of the whole educational ecosystem, and then apply a practical, engineering oriented solution. This solution must be based on a short list of sound principles:
If we continue the auto manufacturing analogy, we have to move from a system of mass production to a system of mass customization. We have to do away with the assembly line as we know it today, but without returning to the individual craftsman approach that existed prior to today's manufacturing. We need a post-industrial process. To accomplish this, we will need to re-think the whole process of education from first principles, and derive an entirely new educational system. MIT's OpenCourseWare Perhaps the best example of educational automation today is the OpenCourseWare Project at MIT which has the ambitious goal of putting the entire MIT curriculum on the Internet, and they have made great progress. However, while the content may be present, the teaching process is largely unchanged. This is our primary criticism of educational automation today: we are automating the existing teaching process, and we have seen that automation without business process re-engineering frequently leads to failure or substantial underachievement in results. Determined students can indeed learn almost the entire MIT curriculum via OpenCourseWare, but we cannot use this as a model for wholesale education reform. If we design a new teaching process for students who have the determination to complete an MIT education, then it will not generalize well to the general student population. OpenCourseWare does not attempt to address the last 4 of the principles asserted above: greatest possible education for all, learning styles, continuous quality improvement, and outcomes based instruction. It is inputs based: "here it is - come and get what you can from it." OpenCourseWare is static, not continuously improving, and limited to a single learning modality, principally because of the cost of doing it any other way. Yet, it constitutes a very serious implementation of educational automation that deserves careful consideration. It or a similar initiative could be the foundation for our proposal within these essays. We must also remember that education reform is not just about what happens inside the United States. A simple Google search for "re-engineering education" will reveal that this is a timely topic, significantly so outside North America and Europe. In Asia and in developing countries all over the world, there is no time or resources or old practices if there is something that is better/cheaper/faster, or - preferably - all three. Kunskapsskolan The closest we have seen to a program meeting our principles is that provided for several years by Kunskapsskolan in Sweden and now in the UK as well. Their approach implements supporting technology, incorporates an outcomes based process, recognizes learning styles, and addresses the other principles to a greater or lesser extent. They provide a very different education in an institutional setting that is comparable to US charter schools. However, there are elements of the implementation that are of some concern. The principle of continuous evaluation is only partly met. We would like to see more of an open source approach to course content, though there is some provision for teacher generated content. And, finally, the risk that the approach could be subverted by oppositional teaching and thereby decay back to the present system is not adequately addressed at a process level. Nevertheless, Kunskapsskolan appears to be an excellent example of the best direction to go. We could do far worse than simply importing their English language content and implementing it in a charter school. Our recommendation is to start with their implementation and then go farther in this direction. International Competition If we as a nation and as a culture don't follow through on these ideas, we will be out-competed by those who do. These proposals are posted to the Internet for the benefit of all. We hope they will be adopted wholesale within the USA, but if they are adopted first elsewhere we will see the results over time as our economic position continues to decay relative to those nations that do. We may not be too concerned about economic competition from Sweden, but China and India are very much another story. Our economy suffers today from a shortage of workers who can think and learn as needed. This problem will continue to limit the growth of our economy until the educational system provides a solution. As in so many other areas, we can be a leader or a follower. It is our strong preference that we lead, and thus these essays lead to a proposed implementation. The Essays This series of essays approaches the concepts of re-engineering the educational process from a variety of perspectives: analytical, theoretical, historical, prescriptive, as well as practical implementations from the point of view of the students and all other participants. They can be read in any sequence, singly, a few, or all. Our proposals do not constitute a silver bullet - in particular, it would be a mistake to focus on the technological aspects of our recommendations. The focus of a re-engineered education system needs to be on this principle of outcomes based education, and all aspects of the educational eco-system that will allow it to flourish. The critical components constitute a 3-legged stool:
Continuous, real-time assessment can only be implemented with technology. Similarly, only technology can reduce the effective cost of textbook publication to zero, and allow multiple simultaneous approaches to the same concepts for the same cohort of students. The technology may be required to implement the 3 legs of the stool, but it is tactical only. The strategy of the approach rests on these ideas and the principles from which they are derived. In particular, without all 3 legs it will not fulfill its purpose and full potential. Compromise in re-engineering efforts is counterproductive: either succeed or fail fast, but don't compromise, for compromise leads to slow failure. If you fail fast, you can probably fix the problem, but if you fail slowly then you follow the path of all the other education reforms into gradual oblivion. This is a work in progress, not a final, finished product, as you will see in the unfinished chapters in the Table of Contents. Indeed, the principle of continuous quality improvement applies here as well: there are certain to be many errors, omissions and other flaws that can be laid at our door and only improved through criticism. We welcome all comments and constructive criticisms.
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© 2009 by Don Estes |
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