Standardized failure

Over the last few days in my Critical Thinking class we've been critiquing the educational system.  After all, who better to ask than a class full of people who've been immersed in it, been the beneficiaries of the successes and the victims of the failures, for ten or more years?  I find that most of them are reasonable and fair about the assessment -- neither lashing out without justification nor telling me what I think they want to hear.  Their criticisms are reasoned, well supported, and usually spot-on.

But nothing riled them up more than the documentary I showed them on the school systems in Finland.  (The link is to part 1, but you can access it all from there -- the entire thing is an hour long but is well worth the time.)  The documentary was the brainchild of Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who went to Finland to see if he could find out why Finnish schools routinely rank at the top of any measure you want to apply to them -- whether it's test scores, rigor, success of students in college or career after graduation, innovation, breadth, or depth -- and why we, in a word, don't.

Finnish students at an outdoor celebration in Helsinki [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wagner interviewed teachers, principals, education professors, students, and parents, and came up with the following rather surprising characteristics of Finnish schools:

• little to no homework
• few tests; the only major exam is the exit exam administered before graduation, which is highly rigorous
• long class periods, and fewer classes per day than typical American schools
• work centering on projects, application, and synthesis rather than memorization of facts
• a lot of projects that require meaningful collaboration (not just the much-hated "group projects" often found in American schools, where typically one or two members of the group do all the work)
• small class size
• informality (teachers are called by their first names)
• an intense and rigorous vocational track that students can enter in tenth grade
• flexibility of choice; students in the vocational track can take classes in the academic track, and vice versa -- and high school can take either three or four years depending on student choice
• a huge amount of trust.  Administrators trust teachers to do their jobs, and rarely do formal evaluations; teachers trust students to do their work, whether supervised or not

Of course, I immediately noticed the stark contrast between the Finnish schools and my own.  And I must emphasize that I am lucky to work in the school I do -- we have great students, few problems, and (I believe) a pretty good success rate (again, however you want to measure it).  But of the characteristics I listed above, virtually every one is the opposite of how we approach things here in the United States.

Which makes me wonder if the success we do have is mostly due to the resilience of the students, the dedication of the teachers to rise above adverse circumstances, and a heaping measure of dumb luck.

The one that struck me the most was trust.  Dr. Wagner was talking to one of the teachers over lunch, and walked back with him to his class -- and was astonished to find out that the teacher was twenty minutes late to his own class.  The teacher, for his part, was a little surprised at Wagner's reaction.  "They know what they have to do," the teacher said.  "I don't have to stand over them and force them."

And sure enough, he walked back into the room -- and everyone was busily working.

In American schools, one of the first things that will jump out at you is the lack of trust.  Rules and regulations abound for what you can and can't do, every minute of the day.  Teachers are of the opinion that as soon as they turn their backs, students will stop working.  Administrators feel like they have to micromanage the teachers to make sure they're doing their job.  The state education departments increasingly add evaluations and observations and "quantitative measures" of principals and teachers, so that everything they do is turned into numbers and used as a tool for reward or censure.  The implication is that no one can be trusted, and the more you watch, the more you control, the better the results will be.

It's been long established, of course, that no one works well while being micromanaged -- not children, not adults.  Dan Pink and others who analyze the corporate world have found incontrovertible evidence that when our every move is scrutinized, when it is evident that there is no trust, our productivity decreases -- as does our job satisfaction.

Why, then, do we think that children would thrive in such an environment?

The Finnish administrators whom Wagner interviewed were adamant that the most important piece in their success was trust -- but that it wasn't easy to achieve, because it meant letting go of the fear that when you stop watching, people will stop working.  But if you couple that letting go with making sure that what you are expecting students to do is meaningful, engaging, and interesting, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The students in my Critical Thinking classes spoke with one voice after watching this documentary: Why on earth do we not try this here?  I didn't have a good answer for that except that we've all become so suspicious of each other -- teachers of students, principals of teachers, state and federal oversight administration of everyone -- that we've become locked into the system even though it demonstrably doesn't work.  Instead of decreasing testing, we've increased it -- and not in any kind of meaningful way.  Just last week poet Sara Holbrook found out that some of her poems were used on the Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, and when she read the questions, she couldn't answer them.

You read that right.  The students were being presented with questions about her poems and expected to select one right answer when the poet herself had no idea how to determine what the right answer was.  We have become so stuck on a linear, one-right-answer mode that we now do everything that way -- even though it clearly kills creativity, destroys enthusiasm, and (as Holbrook's example shows) isn't reflective of anything meaningful or even real.

It's easy to come up with excuses.  "Finland is wealthier than we are."  "Finns are a more homogeneous society than we are."  The documentary dismisses those out of hand -- actually, we spend more per capita on students than Finland does, and 16% of Finnish students learn Finnish as a second language.

But even if those were true -- even if the hurdles we face are higher than the Finns faced in reconstructing their schools back in the 1970s -- so what?  What, exactly, do we have  to lose?  What we have now is only marginally successful, and in many inner cities is a demonstrable failure.  Our dropout rates are on the rise, and our increasing reliance on trivia-dense "quantitative assessments" do nothing but alienate students and further convince them that school is boring, pointless, and has no connection to real life.

It's time to try something different.

And, after all, the Finns have demonstrated that what they do is successful.  Why not try their model?  Okay, maybe it won't work exactly as it's done in Finland, maybe it'll need some fine tuning and adjustment to meet the different needs of students in our country.  But why not try -- and why wait?  As the adage goes, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

The price of micromanagement

It's pretty clear, from a number of different studies in various contexts, that micromanagement doesn't work.

Micromanaged employees have lower productivity, lower job satisfaction, and less willingness to work in teams than employees given more freedom.  A 2011 study at Concordia University's School of Business by researchers Marylène Gagné and Devasheesh Bhave made it clear that when workers have more autonomy, they are happier and work harder.

"Autonomy is especially likely to lead to better productivity when the work is complex or requires more creativity," Gagné said.  "In a very routine job, autonomy doesn’t have much impact on productivity, but it can still increase satisfaction, which leads to other positive outcomes.  When management makes decisions about how to organize work, they should always think about the effect on people’s autonomy."

Some companies have taken this to heart.  Consider the software company Atlassian, which several years ago initiated a new policy called "ShipIt" Days -- once a month, employees are given a day at work of total autonomy.  You can do whatever you want, as long as you're willing to share what you did with your coworkers and employers.  Here's how Atlassian's website describes "ShipIt" Days:

Atlassian’s ShipIt Days have influenced companies from Ennova to Yahoo! to encourage employees to step out of their day-to-day mindset, think creatively about anything that relates to their business and then deliver a solution.  ShipIt Days are inspired by the idea to “ship in a day.”  Participants are given 24 hours to develop a working prototype that “scratches an itch,” innovates around an area related to their personal or team operations, or demonstrates something awesome and inspiring.  The competition is fueled with Atlassian-sponsored pizza and beer and concludes with an edge-of-seat “show-and-tell” where employees vote for a winner.  Along with company-wide recognition and personal bragging rights, the winner takes home a trophy and limited-edition t-shirt. 

“With Atlassian ShipIt Day, employee creativity and team spirit soar,” said Carol Ganz, director of business development for Six Feet Up, a developer of open source web applications.  “ShipIt Days are like playtime which is ironic because this is probably the 24 hours when we work the hardest.”

Now, compare this to the teaching profession in the United States, where teachers are micromanaged from the first bell to the last.  Under the guise of "accountability" and "improving standards," teachers are given scripted "modules" to teach from.  We are not only prohibited from designing our own assessments -- something we were trained to do -- we are prohibited from grading our students' final exams, because of fears that we'll cheat.  There is a drive -- not yet implemented, but likely to be in the next couple of years -- that will prevent principals from observing and evaluating teachers in their own buildings, because apparently the upper administration doesn't even trust the principals.  Teacher observations have to be done by administrators from other schools, thus tying up more of principals' time, and assuring that the people writing evaluations are ones who know little about the teacher or the students they're watching.

It's like educational administrators read the Concordia study upside down and backwards, or something, and concluded that productivity rises when Big Brother Is Watching You.

It's something I found out years ago as a teacher; when I tried one-second-to-the-next micromanagement of the students in my classroom, it always backfired.  The best approach has always been freedom within structure.  In my Critical Thinking classes, the final project is a personal essay describing how your ideas and attitudes have changed over the course of the semester.  I tell them that the instructions are "follow your nose."  If something we studied in the class really made an impact, tell me about it.  Take your thoughts and go deep.  I want a coherent essay that is, in essence, a critical analysis of your own brain, not a list of answers to questions I've created.

"What's the grading rubric?" I often am asked.

My answer:  "I don't have one."

Some students get pretty panicky when they hear that.  We've trained them for years that life is a giant fill-in-the-blank test, and you better fill in the blanks with the right answers.  But nearly all of them rise to the challenge of this project -- some afterwards telling me that it was one of the hardest essays they ever wrote -- and I've seen phenomenal results, despite naysayers telling me when I first started doing this, "This is just giving kids license to bullshit."

I've shown some of the doubters examples of the papers that come out of this project.  They're not naysayers any more.

There are places in the world where teachers and students are given more autonomy.  Schools in Finland, for example, are often lauded as being exemplars of excellence.  Pasi Sahlberg, visiting fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, suggests why this is:

Teachers [in Finland] have time in school to do other things than teach.  And people trust each other.  A common takeaway was that Finnish teachers seem to have much more professional autonomy than teachers in the United States to help students to learn and feel well. 

We do know that teachers’ workplaces provide very different conditions for teaching in different countries. 

First, teachers in the US work longer hours (45 hours/week) than their peers in Finland (32 hours/week).  They also teach more weekly, 27 hours compared to 21 hours in Finland.   This means that American teachers, on average, have much less time to do anything beyond their teaching duties (whether alone or with colleagues) than teachers in most other OECD countries. 

In Finland, teachers often say that they are professionals akin to doctors, architects and lawyers.  This means, they explain, that teachers are expected to perform in their workplaces like pros: use professional judgment, creativity and autonomy individually and together with other teachers to find the best ways to help their students to learn.
 In the absence of common teaching standards, Finnish teachers design their own school curricula steered by flexible national framework.  Most importantly, while visiting schools, I have heard Finnish teachers say that due to absence of high-stakes standardized tests, they can teach and assess their students in schools as they think is most appropriate. 

The keyword between teachers and authorities in Finland is trust.  Indeed, professional autonomy requires trust, and trust makes teacher autonomy alive.

Did you catch the gist of all of that?  Finnish teachers teach fewer hours per week, are given more freedom, don't give standardized tests... and they get better results.

I've often wondered why American educational leaders are so far behind the curve when it comes to taking psychological and management research and incorporating it into the structure of schools.  We've known about these results for years; but due to fears of failing schools and anxiety over what would happen if the leash is loosened, we've seen an increasingly oppressive top-down management style that is known to decrease productivity and job satisfaction.

I've said it before: I've taught for 29 years, and by and large have loved my job.  But if I were a college student today, no way in hell would I become a teacher.

It's to be hoped that we'll wise up one day.  But the delay comes at a cost; there are students now, in classes today, who are being harmed by our attitudes toward teachers and schools.  Maybe it's time we take a page from Atlassian's playbook.  Let go of the reins a little, and see what happens.  It could hardly be worse than our current module-driven, exam-laden, joyless world of the Common Core.