EDLL

There is a spirit abroad in public education today, one that promises to prepare children for a century of unprecedented creativity, innovation, and collaboration and thereby envisions broadly shared prosperity within and across nations. It is a spirit across Europe and Asia that exemplifies the powerful interdependence of education and democracy, of learning and leading. It is a pragmatic commitment to quality teaching for every student, a commitment backed by an impressive national investment in the education, support, and ongoing training of teachers. World class schools have world class leaders and teachers. And they teach their children 21st century skills such as those measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): the ability to think creatively and critically, to collaborate, to communicate well, and to know how to learn.

Yet in America this spirit is only felt in isolated schools and local school districts. Despite the compelling international research base, there is a failure of imagination in America that preempts acting on this research and these concrete international examples on a palpale scale. The national debate over education suffers from an intellectual exhaustion of ideas. We are at a crossroads of two paths where one path is to continue with the present regime of testing and accountability, to do the decades of basic research and elaboration of the data infrastructure that its logic entails. The other is the path inspired by the spirit abroad. This essay defies the conventional wisdom by not constructing a straw man of standardized testing and accountability as our great folly. As tempting as that may be, that would be like what the Dutch call, ?kicking down an open door.? For the problem lies not in the admittedly excessive focus on testing and accountability. Nor does it lie in education. It is rather a far more deeply rooted problem in our culture, one that limits our very way of seeing and greatly circumscribes and diminishes the possibilities of American education and democracy. It is a profound distrust in democracy, an imbalance in our culture of preference for technical authority over human judgment, of elite decision-making over democratic. This cultural problem belies a general crisis in democracy that underlies the reality of the ?absent public,? the persistent problem in politics and in education reform in particular where the ?people? are left out.

In preparing for the coming Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) reauthorization, a new ?reform consensus? has been forged, led by the nation?s governors and chief state school officers. These proposals mainly include ?growth models? that measure individual student growth, differentiated consequences for varying degrees of failure with respect to adequate yearly progress, performance assessments that measure higher order thinking skills, and the use of multiple measures in accountability. The crisis in American education, however, runs far deeper than the reach of this reform consensus. It fails to resonate with the social and economic changes engulfing local communities and the schools in them. Over the past few decades we have continued to create wealth but not a fair distribution of that wealth and income. Income inequality is at its highest since the 1920s. This pervasive crisis is seen in the secular decline in America?s preeminent global economic strength following WWII. The decline is due not only to the greater competition in world markets but also to our failure to replace the traditional organization of work, with its top-down industrial Fordist model, that served us well in the last century. The mass production model and its downward flow of decision-making and elaboration of work into simpler tasks was a management system that required only an educated elite of managers who supervised the work of relatively uneducated employees. Beginning in the 1970s but taking off in the 1990s, the ?third industrial revolution,? driven by leaps in technology, communications, and universal education, is ushering in a ?knowledge economy? for the 21st century. It is a new world where we compete on ideas, innovation, and creativity. Regrettably, American firms are failing to invest in new democratic ways of organizing work that optimize the talents of employees, preferring the short-term gains of outsourcing and downsizing. Belying the same lack of democratic faith, the reform consensus would simply give states more flexibility, while leaving the fundamental regime in tact, will merely replace one tyrant with fifty. The cumbersome weight of its top-down accountability system ? ponderous, slow-moving, inertial masses of data that hang over schools like a heavy omnipresence in the sky ‑ is an anachronism. Increasingly, education is bathed in the black ink of data.

To achieve the 21st century?s promise of broadly shared prosperity, we must educate our children to their full potential and enable them to be life-long learners. But the news is even better. We cannot compete on sheer numbers of educated workers alone, including engineers and scientists; for our numbers will always be overwhelmed by the those of other nations such as China and India who can work for lower wages. Instead, we must also make our workplaces more democratic and less hierarchical, more collaborative and agile. Called ?high performance work organization? (HPWO), these kinds of organizations fully empower employees to continue to learn and to work together. In brief, we can only compete on the basis of democracy and education woven together. This is the alternative vision by which we can regain both wealth and rising incomes for all. We need to rediscover that democracy is our greatest competitive advantage. And educators can and should lead the way.

To restore balance both in education and democracy requires a cultural transformation from the ?bottom-up.? It starts with diverse individuals conversing and sharing ideas face-to-face, gradually growing into a larger community of engaged individuals, one of collective effervescence that leads to meaningful and sustainable change. An engaged public can join school leaders, teachers, and students in the practical work of improving American schools by following the spirit abroad. This spirit requires a national framework of balanced accountability and assessment, respectful of the different purposes, authorities and information needs across the national, state, and local levels of the education system. As shown by research by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this type of balance characterizes world-class education systems. A balanced system is primarily centered on the classroom and the practice of formative assessment. This is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning toward achievement of intended outcomes. The promise of formative assessment is to maximize student motivation, self-efficacy, and academic achievement gains, especially for low-performing students, as shown in decades of research. Evidence gathered from across the globe reveals effect sizes of a half to one and a half standard deviations (a range roughly about 20 to 50 percentile points).

Research by the OECD attributes higher performance by nations to a culture of strong, ongoing support for teachers and collaborative work structures. This resonates with the concept of ?high performance work organization? and current education ideas of teacher leadership, professional learning communities, and comprehensive whole school change. High performance schools can be the pioneers of high performance work organizations in their broader communities. In this way, educators can lead not only in the transformation of their schools but also in that of their communities. By calling forth the strengths in education, we can reinvigorate our democracy and capitalism too.